The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “You probably have as good intelligence about traffic through the Canal as I do, but let me recap the basics for you, if it will be helpful,” Farooq said. “The Canal is 120 miles long and about 85 feet deep, with no locks. Seawater flows freely. The Red Sea is only about four feet higher than the eastern Mediterranean, at Port Said. There is only one shipping lane, with passing areas in the Ballah Bypass near El Qantar and also in the Great Bitter Lake. On most days, there is only one convoy of ships from Suez to the Mediterranean. It leaves Suez at daybreak and passes the first southbound convoy in the Great Bitter Lake. The southbound convoy is moored temporarily to allow the northbound convoy passage. The same happens again at Ballah Bypass, where the northbound convoy has priority while the second southbound convoy is stalled. The passage takes between 12 and 16 hours, depending upon traffic, at a speed of around eight knots, so as not to damage the Canal banks.”

  “So an observer at Ismailia or any other number of spots on either side of the Great Bitter Lake could see the northbound convoy travelling in single file through the narrowest points of the Canal,” Drayton observed.

  “Precisely,” Farooq said. “And of course there is also the collection of fees. This provides a detailed record of each ship. We collect some $6 billion a year in fees from vessels in transit. It is a major source of income for Egypt. The average fee per vessel is something like a quarter of a million dollars, so it is a matter the ship owners take seriously.”

  “I appreciate your help, and I will leave you now, Monsieur Farooq. I hope you will let Mort know if you can be helpful to us in locating the ship, and you know where to reach me while I’m still in Port Said.”

  “I shall,” Farooq said. “But tell me, do you think your target vessel poses any risk to the Canal itself?”

  Drayton paused, not sure how to reply. Feldman has asked him to be as vague as possible, but very little seemed to escape his host.

  “The ship is potentially very dangerous. It contains explosives.”

  “What kind of explosives?” Farooq persisted.

  “The worst kind,” Drayton said. “The worst kind you can imagine.”

  ***

  Philip Drayton returned to his Western hotel. It claimed five stars though its only real attraction was its location, with a clear view of both the Canal and the sea. From the terrace of his fifth floor room he an excellent view of the harbor. But there were mice in the tiny Italian restaurant on the ground floor and the fan in the bathroom sounded like a drone aircraft revving to take off.

  As expected, the room had been tossed, probably by the GIS, the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, or so Drayton thought until he opened his refrigerator and saw that some personal food items had been pilfered. Could it be? That he had not been the victim of an overly zealous Egyptian government but of the hotel staff, simply trying to rip off an American tourist?

  He thought of accepting Monsieur Farooq’s generous offer of the guest bedroom in his seaside mansion. Port Said was quickly losing its ramshackle charm, with its wooden palaces and the colonial legacy of the canal builders. What was it Farooq had said, that money provided the glue that held social institutions together? Perhaps the money was now running out.

  Drayton’s cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. It was the American Embassy in Cairo.

  “Drayton, this is Matt Griechek, do you know who I am?”

  “Yes sir,” Drayton responded. Griechek was CIA’s top man in Egypt, another grizzled veteran of the Mort Feldman era. He and Feldman had been competitors since way back. This could not be good.

  “May I ask what gives us the pleasure of a visit from CTC?” Griechek asked.

  “This is not a secure phone, sir,” Drayton protested.

  “Fuck secure phones Drayton!” Griechek was suddenly shouting. “I want to know what the hell you’re doing on official business in Egypt without talking to me about it first!”

  “Sir, I’m on TDY assignment in Mort Feldman’s shop. I understood before leaving Pakistan that Mr. Feldman was going to contact you.”

  “He did not.”

  “Let me contact Islamabad and find out what happened,” Drayton said.

  “You have secure text?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well let’s do this,” Griechek said, his voice slightly lower in tone. “You write me a message explaining why you’re here, and I will personally contact Mort Feldman in the meantime.”

  “Fine. I’ll do that.”

  “Right now!” Drayton heard a click, and the call went dead.

  Drayton had worked for CIA long enough to recognize the importance of courtesy calls and respect for turf, especially overseas. Mort Feldman often deliberately provoked people by failing to respect boundaries. Had Feldman deliberately set him up with Griechek? He was tempted to call him and find out, but decided he could do that after explaining himself to the man in Cairo.

  He opened his laptop and wrote a one-page summary of his mission—which was to establish a foolproof methodology for tagging the Nippon Yoku-Maru if and when it transited the Suez Canal.

  His room did not have Wi-Fi, so rather than search the hotel for it, he routed the text through his Blackberry, sending the encrypted transmission directly to Cairo Station. Only then did he call Islamabad. The time difference was three hours. It was just after noon in Port Said, just after nine in the morning in Feldman’s shop.

  Feldman answered his cell on first ring.

  “Yeah, I know. I just got off the line with Matt Griechek,” Feldman said when he realized it was Drayton calling.

  “He was not very happy.”

  “As I would have been in his shoes. But I smoothed it over. Everything’s peachy now.”

  “I sent him a written precis of what I was doing here.”

  “Yeah, and I tried to explain it to him too. Were you able to get Farooq on board?”

  “Yes, I think so. He’s going to contact you directly. He seemed especially worried that our target ship might damage the Canal. He guessed what it is that might be on board.”

  “Age hasn’t dimmed him.”

  “There is only one convoy from Suez to Port Said per day. It leaves the Red Sea at 6:00 AM and arrives at Port Said at nightfall. There is no way a ship can get through without our spotting it.”

  “OK, I’ll wait to hear from Farooq, and I’ll take any further flak from Cairo. In the meantime, we have a new development in Saudi. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone. I sent you an encrypted update. You can read all about it. Wait in Port Said for new instructions.”

  ***

  Drayton used his Blackberry to access the Internet and recovered the message Feldman had sent him. The gist of it was that a Pashtun tribesman in Jeddah named Zabet had contacted Saudi authorities after leaving the Nippon Yoku-Maru to complete the Haj in Mecca. He claimed to be a driver who had taken an arms shipment from Tashkent to Karachi. He was recruited by Yasser al-Greeb but had had second thoughts upon leaving the ship to undertake his religious pilgrimage.

  “The man Zabet appears to be a low-level driver on the fringes of terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, more like a bystander,” the summary read. “Fear of capture or a religious conversion prompted him to tell Saudi police what little he knows. He provide descriptions of two foreigners who hired him in Tashkent that match profiles of LeClerc and Marchenko.”

  Drayton did a quick calculation. At fifteen knots, a freighter could make Suez from Jeddah in three days. That meant that the next day, two days at most, the Nippon Yoku-Maru would be visible from his hotel balcony entering the vast Mediterranean.

  Chapter 32 — Peshawar

  The drop at the Mohabbat Khan Mosque was serviced five days after Brigadier Mahmood left his message there. The reply was brief and positive: Brigadier Mahmood was to meet with Al-Greeb in three days, following their usual procedure.

  “So remind me, what’s the usual procedure?” Mort Feldman asked when he learned the news.

  “Ma
hmood arrives at the mosque the morning of the appointed day,” Kate said, “he changes into street clothes inside the mosque, waits in the square until a car comes to pick him up, usually after five or six hours to make sure he’s alone.”

  “It’s a hell of a risk he’s willing to take for us.” Feldman said. The telephone could not mask the strain in his voice.

  “Not only is he in favor of it, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He told me that Al Qaeda wouldn’t dare consider harming an ISI officer. They’re convinced ISI secretly backs them.”

  “That may not be far from the truth. I’m going to have to touch base with Olof on this. I hate to invite flak from headquarters, but this is a first, and I have always thought that Olof was pushing Mahmood because he didn’t think he would deliver.”

  “He’ll deliver. The more information we have about what Al-Greeb has been up to, the easier it will be on us. If we can swing it, it would be good to debrief this new guy Zabet in Jeddah before the meeting. Find out if Al-Greeb was on board the ship and maybe other things that can help us verify statements.”

  “I’ve been trying to decide whether to send you or Phil Drayton, who is already in Port Said.” He told Kate that he would inform Wheatley in Washington and call her back. It was likely that Wheatley would want to be involved in planning the meeting with Al-Greeb.

  “This isn’t going to be a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed situation,” Kate said. “Mahmood is doing this on his own. ISI will never go for another takedown, not so soon after OBL. So if Olof is expecting a new prisoner to take home to Guantanamo, that’s just not gonna happen.”

  “I understand that, but I’m not sure that Olof does. He thinks the Pakistanis can still be pushed around.”

  Feldman said he hoped he would join her in Peshawar. If not, they would continue to coordinate the planning for Mahmood’s meeting by phone.

  Kate was still living at Mahmood’s official digs in the old British cantonment, a home, she had learned, built by a British colonel in the 1940s. Her relationship with Mahmood was still very much professional, though Kate had perceived growing warmth in Mahmood’s treatment of her, as though she were a distant cousin. About her own emotions, Kate thought it best not to inquire too deeply. What was important to her was the mission, always the mission, and to prevent whatever device Yasser al-Greeb had smuggled out of Russia from being inflicted upon the world.

  Kate spent her days at the Consulate doing her best to help Carulla locate the ship in the Red Sea. When Saudi authorities contacted CIA to let them know of the driver named Zabet and his strange story, Kate called a friend posted at the United States Consulate in Jeddah. She learned that Zabet was still being held incommunicado by the Saudis in a safe house to which Americans did not yet have access. It was a delicate situation.

  The Saudis expected to get as much as they gave. They refused to consider turning Zabet over to the Americans. It was possible that Pakistan would be more successful in gaining access to him. At one time he had been a refugee living in Peshawar. ISI got along better with the Saudi Mukhabarat than CIA did anyway. Kate considered trying to get to Jeddah herself, as she often felt that she was doing little good waiting in Peshawar.

  Brigadier Mahmood telephoned her at eleven from his office near the Consulate and invited her to lunch.

  “I want to take you to Lala’s Grill, a change of pace for both of us.”

  “At Green’s Hotel?”

  “You know it? That’s the one. A favorite of our expatriates,” Mahmood said.

  “You know I love Pakistani cuisine.”

  “Yes, but not every day all the time. This is more for me than for you. I have a yearning for clean white tablecloths and gleaming knives and forks. If I could fly to London or Paris for the day, I would do so.”

  “So you’re really just a closet Westerner?”

  Mahmood laughed.

  “Yes, I admit it freely! There is much I love about the West, perhaps more to be found in London than America, to be quite frank.”

  They made a date for noon.

  Green’s Hotel was an inexpensive 50-room hostel in a nondescript building half a mile south of the American Consulate on the corner of Saddar Road and Hospital Road. Twenty-something tourists favored the hotel as a place where they could be comfy and secure. The grubby exterior belied the lovely open court within, draped with cascading green vines.

  Mahmood was already there, waiting for her, seated at a table in Lala’s Grill drinking mineral water.

  “Anything new on the location of the ship?” Mahmood asked, rising to greet her.

  “Are we going to talk business right from the git-go?”

  “Well, then, how are you my dear, forgive me for being so poorly versed in the social arts.”

  Kate thought Mahmood was likely the most socially adept of all the men she had worked with, starting with Mort Feldman, who was rude not via ignorance but by perverse choice, through Phillip Drayton, who was simply nerdy, and Olof Wheatley, a man who tried, unsuccessfully, to feign the real urbanity that Mahmood expressed completely naturally.

  “Well, to answer your question, Alice thinks she’s found a ship close to the profile parked at a Jeddah wharf three days ago. It’s apparently a container ship that has tarps pulled over most of the cargo and superstructure. You don’t often see that, but of course it was sufficient to make the ship look utterly different from the perspective of the satellites.”

  Mahmood ordered veal cutlets with pommes frittes, Kate a chicken breast with wild rice. Kate thought Mahmood was right: it was pleasant every once in a while to forget you were in South Asia by eating Western cuisine, well-prepared by a chef who knew how to pull it off.

  “So we are still thinking then that the vessel is heading for Suez?”

  “That’s a real puzzle for me,” Kate whispered, though no one was sitting near their table. “The Red Sea is like a bathtub. Absolutely confined, with no easy exits. Why would they pick a waterway that is so constrained?”

  “Perhaps because it is unexpected?” Mahmood ventured.

  “And another thing—why is Al-Greeb still in Peshawar and available to meet with you when his pet project is only a day or two from its destination? That just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, that is something I wanted to clear up with you. When we heard from Al-Greeb, he did not say he would meet with me in Peshawar, he simply said that he was available to meet with me, which is not quite the same thing.”

  “So you might have to travel?”

  “The message did not make that explicit, but the wording was different than in the past. I am making a guess. And that guess is that Yasser al-Greeb left the ship at Jeddah three days ago and is either already back in Peshawar or somewhere nearby.”

  Kate’s first thought was that she had to tail Mahmood. Her second thought was that she should keep her first thought to herself.

  ***

  “Kate, do you have the satellite output on your screen?”

  Alice Carulla was on the phone in Islamabad, taking Kate through the IMINT from Jeddah.

  “Yes, I’m looking at a scan of the port facilities labeled Meena Jeddah Al-Islami.”

  “That’s the right one. It’s a port facility next to the ARAMCO Refinery. OK, now look at the tiny vessel by the red crane, at 50 feet to the inch scale.”

  “I still can’t believe this, I’m like a kid with a new toy,” Kate said. “I can see trucks, and I’m guessing these little squares are cars?”

  “And this isn’t the best we can do, but it’s the best I’ve got without getting NSA to sign off on a change in orbit of USA-224 or one of the older KH optical imaging satellites, or an overflight by a drone.”

  “USA-224? What’s that?”

  “The latest and greatest. Think of it as a souped-up version of the Hubble Space Telescope pointed toward the Red Sea from 160 to 620 miles up. It can resolve 4 inches. Three on a clear day.”

  “They’re not putting you on a budget are they?”

>   “Not at all. But more mag isn’t useful right now. We’re trying to spot a 200 foot ship, not a bicycle.”

  “I get it,” Kate said, peering at the image of the Nippon Yoku-Maru. “So how do you know that this is it? The superstructure looks different from the India shipyard shots. And it’s so tiny next to the other ships nearby.”

  “Those are major freighters, 500 to 600 feet long. Do you see that monster with the green deck next to the refinery? That’s the Sirius Star supertanker, 1,100 feet from stem to stern, ransomed by Somali pirates a few years ago for three million dollars. I’m confident that the small vessel near the red crane is our baby. The external dimensions are identical to the Nippon Yoku-Maru, and I can see the outline of intermodals under the tarps. They’ve done some minor painting, probably changed the name of the ship, and they’ve off-loaded four additional containers since India, but this is definitely the Nippon Yoku-Maru, docked four days ago at Jeddah’s main port facility.”