The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  With Nikon lightweight magnesium birding binoculars, Kate used 8X magnification to check for the aircraft. She had no difficulty spotting a Learjet Model 35A, easy to distinguish because it had a shortened passenger area in the fuselage to permit extra-large internal fuel tanks.

  It was a prize bird. It had twin Garrett turbofan engines mounted in nacelles on the ribbing of the aft fuselage, with an additional pair of wingtip tanks for a long-distance edge. She figured it could carry six passengers three thousand miles when it was topped up with a thousand gallons of aviation fuel, which it could easily carry because of the added fuel storage.

  A similar Lear craft had circled the globe in 1996, breaking the record for round-the-world flight. Only weeks earlier, Kate herself had flown on a short-range version, with room for eight passengers, owned by ISI, to fly to India with Brigadier Mahmood.

  This Lear was painted an anonymous grayish white. It bore no insignia or other markings and could have been one of ISI’s own fleet. Kate used a camera built into the Nikon binoculars to take a dozen photographs.

  Back in the hotel lobby, Kate ducked into the business center to send the images to Feldman in Islamabad. She called him on her Blackberry and gave him an abbreviated narrative of what she had seen and learned.

  “Book a room at the hotel with a view of the airfield,” Feldman ordered, “and stay there until Mahmood calls you or the plane leaves. If the latter, try to take shots of who’s on board. And keep in touch.”

  “It could be unrelated to our business here today.”

  “Sure. But I personally think Al-Greeb was on the Nippon Yoku-Maru and therefore can’t be in Peshawar right now unless he flew in. So I’m betting those are his wings.”

  Kate agreed to stay put. She got a room on as high a floor as she could, the fifth, facing the airport. She could barely see the Learjet from the first room she was assigned and so asked to move to an adjoining room where she figured the angle of view would be better. The nonplussed concierge assured her the rooms were identical, but complied with her request. He was used to demanding Americans who made nonsensical petitions for unusual services.

  The view of the plane was better from the second room. The picture framed by her window might easily have been that at a mid-price airport hotel in a drab Midwestern American city. She turned on CNN, but a brownout had downed cable service, not rare in Peshawar.

  Kate kept her eyes trained on the Lear for more than an hour. Shortly before three in the afternoon, she saw three passengers board the jet in preparation for departure, in addition to two pilots and a male cabin attendant carrying an ice chest of provisions and two bottles of soda.

  One of the passengers was, unmistakably, Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood.

  Chapter 34 — Islamabad

  Mort Feldman steeled himself as he connected to Olof Wheatley in Washington. He should never have allowed Wheatley to persuade him to use Mahmood Mahmood to contact Al-Greeb. Now he was going to pay for trusting an ISI senior officer. Why did Mahmood leave Peshawar? And for what purpose?

  “What is this IMINT crap you sent me?” Wheatley asked.

  “That’s a photo of the Learjet in which Mahmood departed.”

  “And who is this tall guy?”

  “We don’t know. Probably an associate of Al-Greeb who was sent to accompany Mahmood to Al-Greeb’s location. He’s certainly not ISI or Pak Army.”

  “How about a flight plan? Do we know where this aircraft or going, or where it came from?”

  “Nothing,” Feldman said. “It doesn’t officially exist. We don’t know where it came from; we don’t know where it went. And we can’t ask.”

  Feldman heard Wheatley chuckle, the sound distorted by the encryption apparatus into an insect-like grating and grinding. It might well have been the sound of Feldman’s career disintegrating.

  “And this is the guy you trusted? The guy who kidnapped you and nearly killed you?”

  “I still trust him,” Feldman said.

  “Look, I really don’t give a rat’s ass about Mahmood right now. He was merely a means to an end, and that end is getting our hands on whatever is on that Japanese freighter. Plus, let me say again, I never trusted Mahmood.”

  “We’ve got the Suez Canal under microscopic observation. Nothing gets through. And while it’s in the Red Sea, no bomb, no matter how powerful, is going to accomplish much. It might as well be under a sand dune in the Sahara.”

  The discussion ended without resolution, but whatever paralysis Feldman felt when he first heard the news of Mahmood’s departure from Peshawar was overcome by his renewed and energetic focus on the Nippon Yoku-Maru.

  Feldman summoned Alice Carulla into his office. She looked upset.

  “Where is that damn ship?” he demanded.

  “I just got this morning’s transmission from Chantilly,” she said, referring to the National Reconnaissance Office in suburban Virginia. “The vessel is docked in Israel.”

  “What!”

  “At Eilat, in the Gulf of Aqaba. Where we really didn’t expect her to go.”

  Carulla showed him an image of a small freighter tied up along a concrete jetty. The harbor facilities were on the western coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, a mile or two southwest of the resort town of Eilat, near the Jordanian border.

  “And this big highway?” Feldman asked, pointing to a four lane route just yards from the port.

  “That’s Mitsrayim Highway, Route 90. It runs right by the port to pick up freight and take it north into the Israeli heartland.”

  Feldman felt rising terror followed immediately by a surge of adrenaline. He stifled an urge to vomit. Through his own physical discomfort, the next step seemed clear to him. Deploy one of his agents immediately in Eilat. He called Kate Langley in Peshawar and told her of Alice Carulla’s discovery.

  “Get down here to Islamabad as fast as you can, and we’ll figure out what we do next. Meantime I’m going to alert Wheatley, the Embassy in Tel Aviv, and the Pentagon. We’ll leave it to the Director and State to decide when and how to tell the Israelis.”

  “What about Phil Drayton?” Kate asked. “Does he need to stay in Port Said?”

  “Let’s figure that out when you get here. And you need to talk to Alice Carulla right away.”

  “There’s more about the ship?”

  “It’s berthed ten yards from the main goddamn highway into central Israel.”

  “The Mitsrayim?” Kate asked. She remembered going over the earlier photos from the Gulf of Aqaba with Alice Carulla.

  “You could walk from the ship to the road. How could we not have seen this coming?”

  “Roads run in two directions, Mort. ‘Mitsrayim’ is the Hebrew word for ‘Egypt.’ If you take it due south, it runs right to the Egyptian border. Look at the map. What could be craftier than taking a bomb out of Israel and into Egypt? The security is ass-backwards. The Israelis don’t check what’s going out the way they check what’s coming in. And the Egyptians aren’t expecting terrorists out of Eilat, a beach resort.”

  ***

  Kate drove to Islamabad in the Suzuki Samurai she had borrowed from the Consulate. She did not ask permission. She could have flown, but she needed the two hours behind the wheel to clear her head. The Learjet that spirited Mahmood away from Peshawar could not have done so without the explicit permission of the Government of Pakistan, which was yet another proof of Pakistan’s involvement with Al Qaeda. Had Mahmood been lying to her? She didn’t think so, yet now, when she would have most valued his advice, he was not available.

  She made good time on the M1 motorway. It had a 75 mile-per-hour speed limit and was as modern as any in America’s interstate system, though with toll booths. There was a wide, grassy median between the multi-lane highways. She never got fully used to seeing people driving on the left hand side of the road.

  By the time she reached the bridge over the shallow Indus River, which marked roughly the halfway point of the 115 miles between Peshawar and the capital, she was re
focused on the problem of the Nippon Yoku-Maru. If the ship still had a nuclear device on board, it was not conceivable that it would get past any kind of Israeli port security, even that at Eilat, which was principally a tourist destination without the inspection facilities of a major commercial harbor. She hoped that Mort Feldman or Olof Wheatley had had the good sense to brief their counterparts in Mossad sooner rather than later.

  Kate took the Kashmir Highway into downtown Islamabad, arriving at the American Embassy in the Diplomatic Enclave just after nightfall. She was not surprised to find that her old quarters were still vacant, smelling faintly of mildew. Open windows cleared up the funk in a few minutes. She was too tired to go to the Embassy or to talk to Mort Feldman, if indeed he was still at his desk.

  She decided to turn in, but she found sleep difficult. Her thoughts kept returning to the Suez Canal, which she still believed made more sense as a target than Eilat. Something like ten per cent of the world’s annual trade passed through the Canal. A ship carrying crude from the Saudi oil fields cut the distance to Europe 40 per cent by using the Canal rather than sailing down the eastern coast of Africa, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and sailing north to Europe. In the world of 2011, with an annual global economy of something like $12 trillion, what would be the economic penalty of closing the Canal?

  At a minimum, crude prices would skyrocket if only because of all the extra bunker fuel the world’s shipping fleets would consume. Delivery times for merchandise would expand. Kate knew that the Middle East division had worked scenarios on the Canal closure and had calculated detailed costs. The 9/11 attacks had probably cost the United States something like $500 billion, half a trillion dollars. What would a Suez closure cost? Three times that, perhaps, in the first year? At least.

  Added to the prestige attached to acquiring a nuclear device, the benefit to Al Qaeda of screwing up Suez would be enormous, and it could be achieved without the slaughter of more than a few dozen human beings, depending upon where the bomb was placed.

  As sleep finally overcame her, she recalled sitting in the auditorium at Liberty Crossing, the National Counterterrorism Center near Tysons Corner, listening to Hendryk Warsaw speculate on the future aims of terrorists.

  He kept talking about the Geneva Center for Security Policy and economic terror as a substitute for mass killing, but she could not remember his words.

  She awoke the next morning in tears, whether from bad dreams or from a feeling of having been abandoned, she could not tell. Probably she was just emotionally depleted. There was no food in the apartment so she went straight to the office, where she knew she could get a cup of coffee and a doughnut from the Marine Guard.

  Her office and desk had been totally taken over by Alice Carulla, but she was able to access her own files via laptop. Out of curiosity, she queried the internal CIA database for ‘Hendryk Warsaw’ and ‘economic terrorism’ and saw the following flash on her screen:

  “Contrary to economic warfare, which is undertaken by states against other states, economic terrorism would be undertaken by transnational or non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. This could entail varied, coordinated, sophisticated, and massive destabilizing actions to disrupt the wealth or economic and financial stability of a state, a group of states, or, indeed, the entire global economy.

  “Under ideal circumstances, these actions, though violent, would not entail significant loss of life but loss of wealth only. It is likely the next step in the evolution of jihadist terror against the West, substituting economic loss for bloodshed. Retaliation against economic loss might be much harder to rally than retaliation against blood loss. Economic terrorism could thus be perceived as a surer path to legitimacy by a terrorist group than mass killing of human beings.”

  “Hendryk Warsaw, 2009, Essays on Asymmetric Conflict”

  Kate read the paragraph several times before the first glimmer of what Al-Greeb might be attempting began to take shape in her mind.

  She looked at her watch. Mort Feldman was probably already on his way in.

  ***

  Feldman was surprised to see Kate Langley sitting in the oversized executive chair behind his desk. He noted she looked haggard and older than when they had last met, and he wondered if she had been drinking. Kate had precisely the same sequence of thoughts about him.

  “Mort, there’s something I need to run by you,” Kate said urgently.

  “Tell me you’ve found Mahmood, Al-Greeb and that this is all over.”

  “We’ll hear from Mahmood. He can’t provide updates. But I think I have insight into what Al-Greeb is up to.”

  “So, tell me something I can use?” the weary CIA station chief said.

  “It’s always bothered me that Al Qaeda would consider using an atomic weapon to slaughter hundreds of thousands of human beings. They’re not suicidal, and such an act would be suicidal, a guarantee of reprisals amounting to total annihilation of the organization, not just by the United States but by every country on earth, even Pakistan.”

  “But that’s their stated goal,” Feldman objected. “Have you forgotten Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa, Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders? He talks about the number of Muslim deaths attributable to the West, and how many American and European lives he is entitled to take to achieve a rebalance? Millions, I recall.”

  “Mort, bear with me. You have to make a distinction between what is said as political theater and what they actually plan to do. Of course I remember the fatwa, but put this in context of Al Qaeda’s real objective.”

  “Which is what? Please enlighten me.”

  “To achieve power, prestige, influence...”

  “I’m no political scientist, Kate, but that seems a stretch to me. I thought Al Qaeda’s goal was to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and other Middle East governments in order to establish an ‘Islamic Republic’ over the whole region, a new Ottoman Empire, a new Caliphate.”

  “And how better to achieve that than by bringing the world’s Western economy to a standstill? To create a situation where reasonable people will demand that USG and others negotiate with them?”

  “Which is how?”

  “For starters, consider this,” Kate said, putting the passage from Hendryk Warsaw’s essay in front of him. “What if the threat they’re planning is purely an economic threat—no deaths. They park their atomic weapon in a part of the Canal far from any concentration of people and tell the world that if anyone attacks the ship, they’ll detonate the bomb. Either way, the Canal is blocked. Nothing gets through. If the bomb goes off, no major loss of life, but the certainty that the Suez Canal continues to be shut down for several years, with the loss of, say, 10 per cent of the value of the trade that goes through it. That comes to something like $1.5 trillion annually, three times the economic cost of the Twin Towers falling down every year. If it takes three years to fix the canal, that could cost world GDP $5 trillion.”

  “So you’re saying that blowing up the Canal is better than blowing up people?”

  “Exactly! Or the threat of it, anyway. Killing people evokes disgust and horror even in the minds and hearts of those who might be predisposed to support Al Qaeda. But causing the world’s richest nations to lose a trillion dollars or more a year would trigger jubilation all over the third world. Even a few American allies might be secretly pleased to see the world’s only superpower put on the economic ropes yet again. It’s a high reward, lower risk option.”

  “OK, you’re making sense, but how does that explain the ship’s presence in the Gulf of Aqaba? It looks to me that they are getting ready to kill Israelis.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Kate. “It could be they have transferred the device to another ship.”

  Feldman’s assistant brought in the overnight cable traffic, printed out for him. Feldman could have read them on his computer, but he preferred paper.

  “Well, here’s some good news from Mossad about your ship,” he said. “The Israelis have boarded her and found nothing. She’s clean. She’s
now called the Aegean Apollon, a new name painted on her hull sometime after she left Jageshwar Shipyard.”

  “So the bomb is somewhere else now.”

  “Yeah, if there is a bomb,” Feldman said. “How about Mahmood? Any word?”

  “Not a thing,” Kate said. “I can only guess that Al-Greeb insisted he come to him, rather than return to Peshawar.”

  Feldman grunted. “And sent an expensive plane for him. What do you want to do about this Suez Canal theory?” he asked.

  “Go join Phil Drayton in Port Said. That’s where I think this thing is heading.”

  Feldman nodded. “Talk to Alice before you go. See if she’s got anything to give you.”

  Chapter 35 — Cairo, Egypt

  Alice Carulla reported to Kate that the newly named Aegean Apollon of Piraeus, Greece, had been released by the Israelis from the Port of Eilat and had promptly steamed four miles across the tip of the Red Sea to the tiny Jordanian port of Aqaba.