SANCTION: A Thriller

by S. M. Harkness

  The underground site was a breathtaking spectacle. Everywhere his eyes landed they were met with expensive stonework and bejeweled edifices. It was magnificent.

  Rather than be impressed however Saleem pictured the refugee camps in his native Palestine. He thought of hungry babies and struggling families. All the while, even Israel’s ancient houses were filled with splendor and wealth. The face of the enemy had never been clearer to him in all his life.

  “I assure you, there is no means of escape that will not result in the violent end of your life,” he said pausing to look around the room at his catch. He had more hostages than he had anticipated. He took it as a blessing from Allah.

  “You have become part of a plan that is much bigger than yourselves,” he said with a cool and even tone.

  Saleem paced the room as he talked, taking in the grandeur of the library. He wondered what some of the artifacts would be worth on the black market.

  “In twelve days’ time you will be set free. You will be fed and you will be housed. Between now and then whether or not you live is determined by your level of cooperation.”

  After his speech, Saleem directed his men to wrangle the remaining hostages as they poured out of the underground site. Fifteen minutes later the University’s Land Rovers were loaded and ready to leave.

  Saleem stood over the shaft once more and stared down its length. He pulled a fragmentation grenade out of a pocket and removed the safety pin. The spoon disengaged from the grenade body and armed the charge inside. He simply dropped it into the shaft and walked away. The explosion was loud. A dense cloud of dark brown dust mushroomed out from the shaft and climbed ten feet above the ground before it lost momentum and began to dissipate.

  The sound echoed through the canyon. Saleem stopped and pulled a tiny handheld video camera from his pocket and opened the side view monitor. He recorded the cloud as it continued to settle over the shaft and then panned around to the vehicles and the frightened students. He rotated the camera around until the lens was filled with his face.

  “We have your children.” He said without emotion. He turned the camera off and placed it on the ground at his feet. The convoy of terror pulled away from the site with nineteen hostages.

  4

  The Caspian Sea, north of Iran

  Hassan Bishara stood at the very end of the ‘Sea Wind’s’ stern. The extravagant yacht stretched on for one hundred and twenty feet behind him. The pleasure ship was complete with a movie theater, bowling alley and Helipad.

  The Syrian found himself fantasizing that it belonged to him. He looked out over the edge of the railing and down to the crisp blue waters. It was warm, even though they were on the water and it was close to nine o’clock in the evening. Heat had poured off of the Iranian coast all day and the ship’s wooden and chrome deck had absorbed it, causing it to permeate well into the night. Stars cluttered the sky and glimmered off of the smooth rollers that gently rocked the craft. He was deep in thought when his host announced his presence with the soft thudding of padded slippers against the teak deck.

  Bishara turned and rushed over to embrace the Iranian Minister of Defense, Anwar Al-Ajlani. The two men smiled while a servant pulled out a chair next to a small glass topped table for the Minister.

  “That will be all,” the Minister said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  The elderly steward slipped past and headed back below deck where he would ensure that his master’s midnight snack of caviar and mint julep tea was satisfactory.

  “Our friend’s speech has angered many,” Al-Ajlani said softly. His gentle tone obscuring his true nature.

  Al-Ajlani had a long and violent past that was fraught with toxic legends about him and his family. His fearsome reputation was ultimately what had landed him the appointment to the Ministry of Defense, along with an inexhaustible list of political contacts from across the Middle East. The Iranian was not weak, like Shaikh Samara, and Bishara had the utmost respect for him. He would tread lightly.

  “This is true Minister Al-Ajlani,” Hassan said as he tipped the end of a thin cigar into his mouth. “But some believe that we will get the West’s attention best by winning their trust first.”

  Al-Ajlani had the moon to his back and as a result his face was hard to see. Bishara was certain the man was smiling. Al-Ajlani already knew most of what Nazari’s plan entailed and he approved.

  The climate of Middle Eastern politics had essentially remained unchanged for decades. Al-Ajlani had scratched and clawed his way to the seat of the Minister of Defense of Iran. With the scores of enemies he had made along the way however, there was little chance of him seeing the appointment to the Presidency that he so coveted. He hoped that his support of Nazari would one day change that.

  “How will he keep Hamas from breaking the ceasefire when he keeps talking about peace?” He asked simply. “No one wants peace Hassan. Not even the Americans.”

  Bishara gave the Iranian the twenty minute version of how things were expected to go and what they still needed from him.

  “I see,” Al-Ajlani said after some time.

  “When does Nazari think such a move is feasible?” He asked Hassan.

  “It has already begun,” Bishara said as he stared into the face of a man who was now definitely smiling.

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  “We don’t know Mr. President.”

  The President leaned against his massive desk and cupped his chin in his hand. Usually he was a chatterbox, but the kidnapping had left him speechless; for the moment.

  President Graham Vanderbilt was a ‘Yale man’, class of 1969. He was a Democrat, and just about as far left leaning as possible. Hated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other mouthpieces of the Republican Party, President Vanderbilt had built a reputation as a polarizing liberal who pushed an agenda that was more at place at the corners of Haight and Ashbury than the halls of power in D.C. As with all politics however, some of it was true, much of it, media persona.

  His National Security Advisor, Edmond Bailey, had broken the news to him three hours earlier. His aides had been scrambling to provide him with a response ever since.

  Bailey continued. “We believe that there were nineteen bodies including the professor, from the University.”

  The President frowned.

  “They are not bodies Edmond, all we need is for the press to learn that my National Security Advisor has begun referring to the hostages as ‘bodies’.”

  “Sorry sir.” Bailey said.

  Edmond Bailey had been appointed to the position of National Security Advisor because of his wealth of experience in intelligence.

  Bailey had served six years aboard the Los Angeles Class–Nuclear Fast Attack Submarine, USS Savannah, as an operations officer before retiring with the Central Intelligence Agency twenty years later. In that time, Bailey had learned the dark truth of just how far America’s enemies were willing to go. This was very different from the vast number of advisors that reported to the President; most of them had either been owed a favor or were simply party loyalists. It was no secret that Bailey and the President agreed on little.

  Edmond continued.

  “No one has claimed responsibility.”

  Usually, whenever a terrorist strike was initiated and successful, groups lined up to attach their name to the free media coverage. In the hours since the attack, no one had raised a single flag for attention.

  “We have several teams digging as deep and as fast as they can for answers.”

  “Mr. President,” said one of his speechwriters.

  A short, stalky brunette walked over to Graham Vanderbilt and handed him a thick sheet of starched White House stationary. The President took it from her and nodded. He took a seat on a gold striped couch and began to read it.

  “Thank you Yvonne, but I would scrap this section here,” he said as he washed over a paragraph with his finger.

  “And here, I want to add that while we are deeply concerned f
or the well-being of these students and we will be strongly encouraging neighboring governments to act in favor of finding the perpetrators of this heinous crime, we are not going to retaliate with force whether direct or indirect etcetera, etcetera.” With that the President smiled and handed her back the copy. The aide left the room in a hurry, anxious to get the revisions finished and approved before her boss addressed the Nation in less than an hour.

  “With all due respect, Mr. President…,” Bailey started as he unbuttoned the top of his suit jacket and sat on the sofa, opposite the Commander in Chief.

  “I always find Edmond, that whenever someone begins a sentence with, ‘with all due respect’ they mean to prepare me for a disrespectful comment.” Vanderbilt stood, walked back to his desk and picked up the telephone receiver. He turned to wait for Bailey’s reply.

  Bailey was stunned. The President had made a snap decision that would probably cost the lives of nearly two dozen people. He knew this President, there was no changing his mind. Anything else he said would be a waste of breath.

  “Never mind, Mr. President, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my office,” he said through a tight throat. The President gave him his best campaign winning smile and placed the receiver to his ear.

  As Edmond Bailey exited the West Wing in front of the south lawn, his heart sank low in his chest. He pictured the American college students at the mercy of the terrorists. He could see their faces, hear their screams. Their young eyes cried out to him. It made him sick.

  He looked down at a list of the captured students in his hand as he walked to his parked government sedan. He still drove himself, though the secret service insisted that he be accompanied by a detail and that he drove one of their approved vehicles.

  Next to the names of the hostages was a larger list of their known next of kin.

  All but one of the names were useless to him. With a red pen in hand Bailey traced circles around the name that stood out in the bunch. He was certain that he’d met him before. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number to his secretary.

  “Hi Deidra, I need you to do me a favor,” Bailey said after three rings. Deidra McCormick had worked for the National Security Advisor long before that had become his title.

  “Yes sir I’m just making dinner for the family,” Deidra said with a giggle.

  “You mean your cat? You need to get out Deidra, a cat is a sorry substitute for a family. I need you to locate an address for DIA agent Brad Ward. I will also need a plane ticket to the closest airport to him. Deidra, I need it yesterday please.”

  “Yes sir, was that Ward sir?”

  “Yeah, do you know him?” Bailey asked.

  “No just making sure I had it right.”

  Bailey was turning onto his street by the time his Blackberry began to chime. He glanced down at the illuminated display; it was Deidra.

  “Sir, I have the address of Brad Ward for you but you won’t be needing a plane ticket. He lives in Maryland about an hour outside of D.C. In a town called Eldersburg. Should I put you on a flight out of Andrews Air Force Base anyway? I checked, there’s a helicopter still available tonight.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Bailey wrote down the address and thanked his secretary.

  Quneitra, Syria

  Everywhere Saleem’s eyes landed, he saw the remnants of havoc and devastation. The old city was gone, replaced by dilapidated buildings and rusted structural beams that reached out of mangled wreckage to point in every direction. Black streaks marred cinderblock and stone structures, where rockets and tank fired Sabo rounds had burned hot white through the air as their propellants guided them toward their targets. The asphalt roads were still pock marked by the teeth of Israeli tank tracks. There was no population to speak of; it was a forgotten war zone.

  Quneitra had been a small, quiet city with a meager gathering of residents but in 1974, it grabbed national headlines when then Egyptian President, Abdel Nasser, had convinced his Jordanian and Syrian counterparts to assemble a military coalition to invade the state of Israel.

  Before Nasser and his fellow conspirators could act however, Israel launched a devastating air campaign that immobilized all three countries Air Forces. After the first few days, it had become apparent that the Arab plan had failed.

  In Egypt, the Israeli engagement took the IDF almost as far east as the city of Cairo, the army stopping only fifty miles short of the capital. Jordan was dealt several lasting blows, from which they had yet to fully recover. Syria had had an entire civilian city rich in culture and history demolished and subsequently abandoned.

  The Syrian government refused to rebuild Quneitra, choosing instead to have a permanent international reminder of what they deemed “Israel’s brutality.”

  Saleem thought that bringing the hostages to Quneitra was brilliant. Any attack, counter-attack or show of force would instantly throw Israeli and American aggression into the spotlight; making it both disadvantageous and difficult to respond to Saleem’s plan.

  Saleem steered the vehicle to the left and headed south. A mile outside of town, he pulled the truck over to a dirt shoulder and got out. From a trunk in the bed, he produced two small slender tubes, each were notched on one end of the tube body. One of the tubes had a mirrored glass panel embedded in the notch while the other had a small lens. Gone were the low-tech days of a physical trip wire attached to a detonator. The Palestinian forced one of the tubes into the dry hardened soil with the palm of his hand. It would fire a laser to the other tube which would receive and send back the beam via its glass panel. If anything broke the beam it was set up to alert Saleem on his cell phone with a text message that would simply read BREACH. This would allow him to monitor the access point without putting a valuable man on guard duty. He didn’t intend on setting up any munitions here, though the device was capable of it.

  Even though Quneitra was one hundred percent Syrian, the United Nations had passed a resolution shortly after the war in ’74 to make the city a, “U.N. Disengagement Observer Force Zone”. Ever since then, a small group of Peace Keeping soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the town’s footprint. Saleem couldn’t be sure yet but he believed they had no clue that he and his men were there.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he thought to himself as he contemplated the possibility of a confrontation with the platoon sized United Nations element. They were always passive. They wouldn’t do anything even if they became aware of Saleem and his men. Still he knew it was when, not if, the U.N. observers discovered their presence in Quneitra.

  5

  Washington D.C.

  Brad pushed in the clutch and slid the small, leather gear shifter into fourth. The six cylinder engine revved as the car poured into the adjacent lane. Traffic on the D.C. Beltway was horrendous in the morning but the Defense Intelligence agent navigated the highway well enough, his black Porsche accelerating through the broad swooping bends quickly.

  Brad Ward had been with the Defense Intelligence Agency for just over seven years. He had started as an analyst in a cramped room on the third floor of a building on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

  Back then, Brad had spent his days laboring over an endless stream of reports that, in and of themselves, posed little meaning for the war on terror or the intelligence community but which taken as part of a greater collage of recent history, painted a vibrant and detailed picture of America’s enemies.

  Still, for Brad, it wasn’t enough. After two years, the Colorado native had applied and been accepted into the DIA’s Clandestine Service. It was a vastly different world than the one he had begun his career in. In the five years since, he had become somewhat of an Agency legend and a bit of a ghost. People who had known him as an analyst dismissed the stories that trickled back up to their lonely cubicles by way of the water cooler. As with all legends, much of the details were exaggerated if not completely untrue. But if anyone was going to be revered in the Agency’s tiny group of operators, the
DIA wanted it to be Brad. He was the poster boy for a successful crossover into the shadowy universe of “Black Bag” operations. He was the epitome of the Service’s unofficial slogan, ‘you could be anybody, anywhere,’ and he had become it, in less than a decade.

  Brad had been mulling over his late night visit from the President’s National Security Advisor and the subsequent news of his brother’s kidnapping for hours. It was not the first time he had met Edmond Bailey. Though it was the first time the man had come to his house. It had been almost midnight, not that it mattered. His internal clock was forever skewed by hundreds of flights around the globe and endless shifting between time zones. He hadn’t been asleep.

  Something Bailey had said was gnawing at him. “I don’t know what the President is going to do but I wouldn’t expect much.”

  Brad pulled up to a guard shack several hundred yards from the entrance to the White House. A tall Marine asked for identification and then retreated back to his shack with Brad’s driver’s license and CAC card in hand. After a couple of minutes the man came back holding a clip board for him to sign. He flagged him past the shack and directed him to another station where two other uniformed men waited with bomb detecting equipment and a calm but alert German shepherd.

  The two men showed Brad to another tiny building with a set of chairs he ignored. He observed their inspection through a window in the door. They poured over the European sports car with kid gloves. One passed a convex shaped glass mirror on wheels below the undercarriage while the other inspected the engine beneath the rear deck lid. The dog waited patiently for his turn and once he was up, he was all business. Starting with the front bumper, the dog sniffed and walked the perimeter of the vehicle until he found himself back at the spot where he’d begun.