McGarvey walked across the hall to the DO’s conference room at two in the afternoon. He had managed to pull together what information they had so far on bin Laden’s compound and his probable movements in the past two months since he’d left Afghanistan. But if they were going to mount an operation to take him out they would have to know a lot more. For instance: They knew that he was never without guards, but almost nothing was known about them; how they were selected, where they came from. If they were going to find a way to get to bin Laden it might have to be through one of his guards. They also had to know more about his communications; who he talked with and how. They needed to know who was coming to see him on a regular basis, and what they were probably talking about. It was possible that he and the NIF had had a falling out, and maybe he could be gotten to through the Sudanese government. They needed to know where his wives and children were staying; who shopped for his groceries and who prepared his meals; where his water came from, and if there was a possibility of poisoning it. Assassinations were not always accomplished with a bullet to the brain.
It was a far cry from teaching at Milford, he told himself. Voltaire would probably have understood what he was trying to do, though the philosopher would have wondered what might become of a man who tried to stamp out evil by doing evil deeds himself. McGarvey had been asking that question all of his life.
“Good afternoon, Dick,” McGarvey said. Surprisingly Adkins was the only one here so far.
“I told everybody else two-fifteen. I wanted to talk to you first,” Adkins explained.
“I should have brought you in this earlier, sorry about that, but I had a lot of thinking to do. The general’s not real happy, but he can’t see any other way out either.”
“Well, you’ve got everybody’s attention. Considering the information you’ve been asking for, the word is already out. But nobody is disagreeing with you — at least not in principle,” Adkins assured him. “The problem is going to be the trigger man.”
“I’m going to set up shop in Riyadh,” McGarvey said.
“Right,” Adkins said. “I can’t imagine that the general went along with that.”
“I’m just going out there to make sure that Jeff Cook gets the word. He knows what resources he has on the ground.”
Adkins gave him a wan smile and shook his head. “Somehow I find that hard to believe. So will everyone else. Beating Van Buren on the fencing strip is one thing, but going back out in the field banged up the way you are is another.”
“We might not have to send any of our own people,” McGarvey said. He knew that this was the kind of reaction he would get. “If we can lure him to a meeting somewhere in Yemen, just across the border, Saudi intelligence can put up an operation to grab him.”
“That might work,” Adkins said after a moment’s thought. “But he’s survived for too long to fall for anything easy. Whatever the meeting is about, and especially whoever it’s with, will have to be damned convincing.”
“I agree,” McGarvey said. “Assuming that Turabi and the NIF are having some sort of a dispute with bin Laden it could be about the bomb. I mean that’s not such a leap of imagination. Maybe they think it’s over the top. Too extreme right now, especially with the moderates in Iran.”
“Okay,” Adkins agreed with some uncertainty.
“We’re guessing that the bomb went through Pakistan, possibly out of Karachi, maybe by ship or by plane.”
“That’s a possibility we’ve looked at, Mac. But we haven’t come up with a thing. Hell, we don’t really have anything here except speculation.”
“But it’s possible,” McGarvey pressed the point.
Adkins nodded.
“Okay, so Pakistan has its own troubles with us right now over the nuclear question an dover their new military government, so they can’t afford to upset us. If the ISI asks for the meeting on neutral ground in Yemen to promise bin Laden that they’ll give him anything he wants providing he turns over the bomb to them, he’ll come.” ISI, or Interservice Intelligence, was the Pakistani intelligence agency.
“What’s to stop him from picking up the telephone and calling them, besides his paranoia?”
“We do, from Riyadh. We’ll leak the word that we’ve redirected our southern India Jupiter satellite into position over the Sudan.” Jupiter was the program to closely monitor Indian and Pakistani communications because they had gone nuclear.
“Do you think that if he’s in custody or dead, that it’ll stop Bahmad from going ahead with whatever plan they hatched?”
“I don’t know, Dick,” McGarvey said. He sat down. “We’ve had no luck finding him or the bomb, and assuming we can get through this weekend in one piece, maybe an end run will be the only practical thing to do.”
“That’s assuming the Saudis will want to announce that they’ve finally caught bin Laden,” Adkins pointed out. “There’d be a lot of repercussions against them and us. Most of the Islamic world would be up in arms.”
“They are anyway, Dick.” McGarvey shook his head. “No matter how this thing turns out we’re going to end up being the bad guys. And that’s just the way it is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Los Angeles
It was a few minutes past 10:30 a.m. when Bahmad entered the Fremont Building just off Pershing Square. He was dressed conservatively in a blazer, gray slacks and club tie, and carried a thin attach case. He’d recolored his hair salt-and-pepper gray.
He took the elevator to the eighteenth floor offices of Omni Resource Financing, Ltd. “Gordon Guthrie to see Mr. Sanchez,” he told the pretty receptionist. He handed her his card.
“Do you have an appointment this morning, sir?” the young woman asked cooly. “Mr. Sanchez is in conference at the moment.”
“No appointment, luv,” Bahmad said. “But if you’ll just give him my card, he’ll see me.”
The receptionist picked up the telephone and pressed a button. “Luis,” she said and she hung up. A moment later a young Hispanic man, very sharply dressed, came out, took the card, glanced at Bahmad and went back inside.
Bahmad smiled. “Have you worked for Mr. Sanchez very long?”
“Yes, sir. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”
“No thank you. I won’t need more than a minute or two of his time.”
She gave him a smirk and turned back to a pile of mail that she had been sorting. Bahmad drifted over to a very nice Picasso print on the textured wall, but when he got closer he saw that it wasn’t a print after all, it was an original. He looked around the large, very well furnished reception area. Six other paintings ranging from a Gainsborough to a Warhol, all originals, hung on the walls with absolutely no sense of coordination or theme. But then he supposed it was to be expected. Emilio Sanchez had no class but he headed the largest Mexican heroin cocaine cartel in history so he had plenty of money. Unlike the Colombian drug lords who operated out of jungle fortresses and seldom took the chance to travel far from their safe havens because they were afraid of being captured, Sanchez conducted his affairs out in the open here in Los Angeles as a respected, if flashy, businessman. He had his financial fingers into everything from real estate to offshore oil exploration, and from Silicon Valley high-tech companies to portfolios of blue chip stocks.
All of it was a front for a highly sophisticated money laundering operation that no government in the world had uncovered yet. Sanchez himself had been nothing more than a small-time gangster in Mexico City until eight years ago when bin Laden’s people had sniffed him out, and set him up in business here.
Since then he’d become a godless, arrogant bastard filled with self-importance, but he was getting the job done. In the last three years alone more than two and a half billion dollars had passed through Omni Resource Financing, and the next three years had promised to bring more of the same. Until now, Bahmad thought. In a few days everything would change, and there would be no going back for any of them.
“Mr. Guthrie,” the receptionist ca
lled.
Bahmad turned and gave her another smile. “Yes?” Luis stood respectfully at the open door, and the receptionist’s demeanor had changed from one of dismissal to one of respect.
“Mr. Sanchez will see you now, sir.”
“Thank you,” Bahmad said. He followed the young man down a broad, thickly carpeted hall, more originals on the walls, past several large offices in which a lot of people were very busy at work, to a palatial corner suite of beautifully furnished offices with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded a magnificent view looking east across the city toward the San Gabriel Mountains.
Emilio Sanchez, dark and dangerous looking, sat scowling on a leather couch by the windows, two men seated in chairs across a broad coffee table from him. One of them got up and came across the room, smiling.
“Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Guthrie,” he said. “I’m Francisco Galvez, chief of corporate security.” He looked like a cop, with dark eyes that seemed to miss nothing, square shoulders and a firm grip. The other man was very thin, almost emaciated, with a heavily pockmarked face. He wore thick glasses. He was smoking a cigarette and the ashtray in front of him was nearly half full. He seemed very nervous. Sanchez, on the other hand, was short, going bald, somewhat paunchy and seemed surpremely confident.
“You might be just the man I came to see,” Bahmad said pleasantly.
Galvez who only knew that Bahmad worked for bin Laden, gave him a searching look, then brought him across the room where he introduced the thin man as their CFO Juan Zumarraga, and then Sanchez. Neither of them rose to shake Bahmad’s hand, nor was he offered a seat.
“What can we do for you?” Galvez asked directly.
Good, Bahmad thought, there was to be no time for pleasantries. “I’ll take just a moment of your time,” he said, smiling politely. “Since this has nothing to do with your financial operations, Mr. Zumarraga can get the fuck out of here, and somebody can get me a beer.” He glared at them. “Now.” He sat down in Galvez’s chair, opened his attache case and took out a map of the west coast of Baja California.
After a moment Sanchez nodded. Galvez went off to get the beer and Zumarraga got up and left. Bahmad marked the approximate position of the Margo on the map and handed it across the table to Sanchez. They had been told to expect him, but that had been a couple of months ago, before the missile raid on bin Laden’s camp. A lot of attitudes had changed since then.
“She’s a cargo ship northbound. I have to get aboard her sometime within the next twenty-four hours. Preferably tonight.”
Sanchez glanced at the map, then handed it to Galvez who’d come back with the beer. “What’s in it for us?” he asked.
Bahmad considered the question for a moment. “Your continued employment,” he said. “You’re doing an acceptable job, and we would like to keep it that way.”
Sanchez was amused. “Things have changed. Maybe I will simply continue on my own. I have connections.”
Bahmad considered that for a moment too, and then shrugged. He put the beer aside, took the map from Galvez and put it back in his attache” case. “Someone will be sent to assassinate you and your family. That will include your wife and children, as well as your mother and your young sister, Juanita.” Sanchez sat forward. “You fucking come here and threaten me?”
Bahmad spread his hands. “I’m merely the messenger from our friend,” he said. “I have no part in his plans, Mr. Sanchez. Believe me, I am nothing more than what you might call a bagman. But it is important that I get aboard that ship very soon.”
Sanchez was shaken, though he tried to hide it. He knew very well what bin Laden and his people were capable of. “How is Osama now?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Bahmad replied coldly.
Sanchez bit his tongue. He gave his security chief a questioning look.
“We could chopper Mr. Guthrie to Long Beach and fly him down to Rosario in the Gulfstream by three,” Galvez said. “How far off shore is your ship?” he asked Bahmad.
“A hundred miles by now, I should think.”
“Miguel could have him out there by dark in the Cigarette.”
“Do it,” Sanchez ordered. “Anything else?” he asked Bahmad.
“Forget that I was ever here,” Bahmad said, rising.
CIA Headquarters
McGarvey tired easily, though he was getting better. His staff was putting together the mission parameters, and Dick Adkins would make sure that they stayed on track. McGarvey had his own agenda to work on this afternoon, and at the moment he didn’t want any interference.
Killing bin Laden and getting away safely would be difficult but not impossible if the plans stayed dead simple. Put a committee on it and the first thing that would come up was proof that the mission could not succeed. One man could not do it on his own. The job would take a small army. But the logistics for such a strike would be impossible to keep simple. Look what had happened when Jimmy Carter tried to mount a rescue operation in Tehran. The project should be scrubbed.
And maybe we were already too late, Adkins had suggested after the staff meeting. Killing or arresting bin Laden could very well be a moot point if the bomb were to be detonated in the middle of the planning stage. Then you’d better make it quick, McGarvey had shot back sharply. Adkins was used to him by now, but McGarvey had seen that his remark had been over the top. It was too bad, but they had work to do to avert a disaster. He would apologize later.
Bin Laden was holed up in Khartoum, the troubled and complicated capital of a troubled and complicated country torn apart by almost continuous fighting. Its oil reserves were thought to be as vast as Saudi Arabia’s. Religious factions were fighting each other. And the Iranian military was in Sudan in a very big way because of the strategic importance of the country. It had leases on military bases in Port Sudan and Suakin that ran until 2019, thousands of Iranian soldiers were in training on Sudanese soil and there was a powerful Iranian-funded radio station in Port Sudan that beamed Islamic propaganda to the entire region.
But the CIA also had a hand in Sudanese politics, something that McGarvey had only come to realize after he’d become deputy director of Operations. He was trying to extricate the Company from the morass, but it had become a Dennis Berndt pet project, and getting out was impossible for the moment. Money and arms were being funneled to the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army of Christian Nilotes. They weren’t doing much to change the nature of the politics over there, but they were a source of potential embarrassment to the U.S. It was something he’d tried to explain to the White House, but his arguments fell on deaf ears. Leave politics to the politicians, he’d been told.
There were any number of the SPLA’s soldiers who could be persuaded to try for a hit on bin Laden. McGarvey had seriously considered the possibility. But there wasn’t one chance in a million that any of them would be successful, let alone survive the attempt. They were farmers turned amateur soldiers. They did not have the discipline, the equipment, the training or the dedication to carry out such an operation. They might be able to supply the shooter with a relatively safe haven after the kill, and possibly the means of getting him out of the country, but nothing else.
A detailed street map of downtown Khartoum was displayed on his computer monitor. The map was keyed to the National Reconnaissance Office’s digital file of satellite photographs. He clicked on the vertical borders and brought them inward until they encompassed the block in which bin Laden’s compound was located. He did the same with the horizontal borders, then clicked on the photo reconnaissance record. A menu came up showing more than a hundred shots, some of them infrared, of the area within the box, each marked with a date and time. He pulled up a series that had been taken over a five-day period starting two months ago, just after the missile raid.
It was too much to hope that one of the satellites might have caught bin Laden himself showing up, but he was looking for the same kinds of patterns he’d asked Rencke to look for. Was the traffic to the compound mostly from th
e outside, or were bin Laden or his people traveling out of the compound to attend meetings elsewhere in the city, or the region?
A big problem was that bin Laden had an inside track on the satellites’ orbits. It could be someone on the inside of the NRO, or possibly even computer hackers who’d gotten into the system, found out what they wanted to know and then got back out, all without being detected by one of the new anti hacker programs. Rencke thought that was a slim possibility at best. Actually figuring out what satellite would be “overhead at any given time was fairly simple for someone who knew some mathematics and some rudimentary orbital mechanics. If you plotted a satellite’s movements across the sky at night when it could be seen, a mathematician could predict where it would be at any given time. Thus whenever a photo recon satellite was overhead there seemed to be a sharp drop in traffic in the area around the compound.
Finding nothing in the first series of photographs, McGarvey narrowed the horizontal and vertical borders to box in nothing but bin Laden’s compound. As before a menu came up showing a series of photographs that were taken in the past seven years since the compound was first identified as a possible bin Laden stronghold. The number of photographs was well over one thousand, practically speaking, a dead end for him, McGarvey thought.
Rencke came from Adkins’s office unannounced. “You’re not going to get anywhere like that.”
McGarvey looked up, vexed that he was being interrupted. “Try knocking next time.”
“I only meant that I’ve been over all those pictures. You already know what I came up with.” It suddenly dawned on Rencke what McGarvey was really up to and his eyes widened. “Oh, wow, Mac, you can’t be serious. Not after what you already went through.”
“It has to be done.”
“If you say so,” Rencke said. He started hopping from one foot to the other. “But use somebody else.”
“There isn’t anybody.”
“You mean that there’s nobody you’d be willing to send on such a mission,” Rencke countered.
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