“Slaughtered, you mean,” Murphy replied sharply. His anger was bubbling to the surface. Like everyone else at headquarters he wanted to strike back right now at whoever was responsible. Which was a good thing, and something that the President was going to demand, providing they didn’t hit the wrong target for the wrong reason.
At sixty-two, Murphy was twelve years McGarvey’s senior, although this morning he looked twenty years older than that. In his day he had commanded a tank batallion, and he had earned the nickname Bull Murphy, after the navy’s Admiral Bill Halsey, because despite his size he could move quickly and decisively, and like Halsey he had no trouble making straight-ahead decisions. It was quite a combination, an old friend of Murphy’s had told McGarvey a few years ago. Watching Roland climbing in and out of tanks was like watching an angry bull that had taken ballet lessons. It was nothing short of awesome. You got out of the way when the man was on the move. But nearly two decades behind a desk had softened his lines, blurred the edges, slowed his body, though not his mind.
“It wasn’t his style, you know that. You read Allen’s report.”
“The bastard thinks he can kill our people and get away with it,” Murphy countered strongly. “Well, he’s dead wrong, and we’re going to show it to him.” Murphy had directed the CIA through three White House administrations, and he had never been responsible for the loss of an employee’s family. Do the job, but get it done safely, was his watchword. The old cowboy days of shoot ’em outs in Czechoslovakia, parachute drops into Hungary, clandestine jungle training camps in Honduras and arms deals with the Contras were things of the past. Intelligence-gathering in the twenty-first century had become primarily a matter of technical means; electronic eavesdropping, satellites, computers. Shooters like McGarvey had become anachronisms, and Murphy, who had directed many such black operations, had always despised the endeavors with everything in his soul, while at the same time understanding that sometimes violent means were necessary. But he counted this tragic business with Trumble a personal failure. He was ready to turn the clock back. Strike the bastard responsible where he lived.
He glanced at the clock on his desk. “I want you ready at eight-thirty, that’ll give us plenty of time to get over to the White House. Since it’s your operation you’ll give the briefing.” He gave McGarvey another speculative look. “Killing one of our chiefs of station is one thing, but his family? That’s nothing but terrorism, and bin Laden is the master of it. We’re going to teach him a lesson. It’s something that the President wants, and it’s something I’m going to go along with.”
“There’s another consideration, General.”
“Then you’ll have to offer the man an alternative, Kirk. Otherwise we’re going to war.”
FIVE
The White House
The DCI’s limousine pulled up at the White House west gate a few minutes before 9:00 A.M., and the guard waved them through. Both Murphy and McGarvey were well known to the Secret Service. They proceeded up the driveway to the portico where Ken Chapin, the DCI’s bodyguard jumped out and opened the car door for his boss.
McGarvey let himself out and stood for a moment looking up at the marine guard at the door. Forty-two presidents before this one had made a lot of tough decisions from this building. Just one year into an administration that was thrust upon him, Lawrence Haynes was going to be faced with a very tough call. McGarvey had the feeling that the man was up to it. At least he hoped for all of their sakes that he was.
“Let’s not keep the man waiting,” Murphy said, and McGarvey fell in beside him. Together they entered the White House and took the elevator downstairs. They were met by a security detail outside the situation room who checked their briefcases before they were allowed to go inside.
The President had not arrived yet, but already the mood around the long table was somber. Flanking the President’s empty chair were Dennis Berndt, his adviser on national security affairs, and Anthony Lang, his chief of staff. They were deep in discussion, but Berndt looked up and gave McGarvey a penetrating glance that was anything but friendly. He looked pissed off, and in the short twelve months of his tenure he’d built a reputation as an easy-to-anger, formidable force to be reckoned with.
On the other side of them were the secretary of defense Arthur Turnquist, secretary of state Eugene Carpenter, attorney general Dorothy Kress, FBI director Herbert Weissman, who had himself just arrived, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Richard Halverson and the National Security Agency director Air Force Major General Thomas Roswell. Murphy and McGarvey took their places next to him, everyone around the table acknowledging them with a nod.
Most of the people at the table were new to this administration, and although McGarvey knew all of them, he didn’t know them well enough yet to be able to predict their responses like he had with President Lindsay’s staff and cabinet.
Haynes had been vice president when Lindsay had suddenly resigned because of ill health last year. One of Haynes’s first promises to the American people was to guarantee their safety by threatening swift and merciless action against any man, organization or government bent on terrorism. He was taking back the fear, and he’d packed his administration with tough, like-minded men and women who were not afraid to make decisions. It was, with some few exceptions, a pleasant change.
Roswell handed Murphy a thin file folder. “These are the latest telephone intercepts from bin Laden’s headquarters. I think you might find them interesting.”
“What’s the upshot?”
“He never returned from Khartoum, and his people are starting to get nervous.” Roswell, who looked like a banker with a stern, sometimes sour expression on his round, bland face, had no sense of humor. But he ran his agency, which was three times the size of the CIA, with a lot of creativity. It was said that he played a competent second violin in a string quartet, but that was only speculation because no one admitted to ever having heard him play.
“They know we’re listening, it could be orchestrated for our benefit,” Murphy said.
“That’s what we think,” Roswell said unblinking. “But if that indeed is the case, why do it? What is he up to?”
McGarvey handed a diskette to a corpsman to load into the briefing computer. The remote control was on the table in front of him.
“He’s not stupid, Tom,” McGarvey said. “He’s probably figured out that we’re going to blame him for this, and we’re going to make a response. He’s keeping his head down.”
Roswell gave McGarvey a hard look. “About what I’d do.”
The President came in and everybody got to their feet until he had taken his position. He looked angry, and, like everyone else around the table, tired. None of them had gotten much sleep last night.
“Let’s get started, people. We have a busy day ahead of us.” Unlike Lindsay, who was tall, thin and “Lincolnesque” as the media called him, this president was built like a Green Bay Packer linebacker, with a massive head, twenty-five inch neck and broad shoulders bulging with muscles. The political cartoonists all exaggerated his physique; in a number of instances they showed him in the boxing ring with captions along the lines that if wars were outlawed in favor of leaders duking it out in the ring, there’d never be any doubt who’d come out the winner. A lot less blood would be shed too.
But as tough as he was, his wife Linda was a kind, gentle spirit. Compared to a young Barbara Bush, she was universally loved by just about everyone in America. As was their beautiful twenty-three-year-old only child, Deborah who had never left home because she was retarded, suffering with a mild form of Down syndrome. From a distance she could be mistaken for a Siberian athlete, or even a Russian haute couture model who had defected to the West. But up close you could see the vacancy in her eyes and in her warm but childlike smile. Haynes was a family man, highly intelligent and honorable, with a squeaky-clean past. Not once in a twenty-seven year political career, which included two terms in the Senate from Oklahoma, had there e
ver been so much as a hint of scandal associated with him. The media was sometimes frustrated by the lack of juice, but when he’d become President the nation had sighed a collective sigh of relief: Finally we got a good one, with a family we can love and even feel a little sorry for. What made it even better was that Haynes had never capitalized on his daughter’s affliction, though he could have done so for political gain. Everyone, even his enemies, respected him for this. In the next election it was expected that he would win by a landslide no matter who was put up against him.
McGarvey passed a stack of leather bound folders around the table. “Mr. President, this is the SNIE that we prepared. I’ll make my briefing short this morning, but all of the supporting data and dissenting arguments are included in the folder.”
The President held McGarvey’s gaze for a long moment then looked around the table. “I want you all to be perfectly clear on one thing. A brutal act of terrorism against American citizens on American soil has been committed. We will make an appropriate response. A harsh response.”
“Damn right we will,” Berndt said.
McGarvey glanced at his copy of the SNIE open in front of him. He’d had time to briefly scan it on the way over from Langley, but his staff had come up with very little that was new in the past six hours.
“Everyone here knows that our chief of Riyadh station, Allen Trumble, was shot to death along with his wife and children and two tourists down in Orlando yesterday afternoon. In the past fifteen hours we’ve been trying to make some sense of their murders, and what that act of terrorism might mean for the future.” McGarvey closed his SNIE folder. “Mr. President, it’s going to be very easy to jump to conclusions, possibly the wrong conclusions, so I’m going to ask everyone to keep an open mind until I’m finished here this morning. It was the same thing I told my staff last night.”
He could see the same look of skepticism and anger around the table as he had during his briefing last night.
“Fair enough,” the President said, nodding. “You may continue.”
“In June I asked my Riyadh station to try to open negotiations with Osama bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “I did this for a number of reasons, among them the generally held belief that bin Laden was getting ready to make another strike against U.S. interests somewhere in the world, and possibly even here on our soil.” The situation room was suddenly very still.
“In my opinion I thought there also was a possibility that bin Laden might finally be tiring of his life of exile, and might want to go home to Saudi Arabia. He’s in his forties now, he has three wives and more than a dozen children, plus family and friends at home. His life in Afghanistan has to be getting old. To date nothing he has done has changed anything, except that we’ve frozen as many of his assets as we could find, and we’ve put up a five million dollar bounty on his head. Step by step his movements have been restricted, and even the Afghani Taliban party is starting to get weary of his presence.”
“What were you going to offer him?” Berndt demanded. “I never saw such a proposal.”
“The operation had my approval,” Murphy said softly.
“For starters, the return of his assets, and lifting the bounty. He’s said all along that one of the things he wanted was the removal of our forces from Saudi Arabia. We’re already talking about doing that, so all that’s left would be to broker a deal with the Saudi government so that his family could return home.”
“No amnesty,” the President said angrily.
“No, sir. Bin Laden would be made to understand that he’d have to face charges for what he has already done. Possibly in the World Court at the Hague. He’s a fighter, and he might agree to the proposal because it would give him the forum to tell his side of the story. He’d certainly get the attention of the entire world.”
“Well, we know what his response was to that proposal,” Berndt said.
“Not necessarily,” McGarvey replied, keeping his anger in check. He wanted to tell the NSA to shut up and either read the SNIE or listen to the rest of the briefing before he shot off his mouth. But he couldn’t do that.
“All right, Mr. McGarvey, what was bin Laden’s response?” the President asked.
“We set up the meeting through our embassies in Pakistan and the Sudan, and Trumble went to see him in Khartoum. It only lasted a couple of minutes, but bin Laden said that he was willing to talk, but only to someone higher in rank than a CIA chief of station. That’s the report Allen brought back with him. Along with a serial number.”
“Five days later bin Laden had him killed,” Berndt said.
“We don’t think so,” the FBI director said. “The one terrorist left behind was Egyptian, and he’d been in this country for more than three years working for a company that had only a brief association with bin Laden’s interests. And that was more than five years ago.”
“Oh, come on, Herb, that’s a load of crap and you know it,” Berndt said. “Maybe bin Laden didn’t actually pull the trigger, but he was responsible.”
“I haven’t heard anything yet to change my mind,” Admiral Halverson said angrily. He turned to McGarvey. “You said yourself that the bastard was probably planning something big. Maybe this action was meant to keep us busy, keep our attention and assets focused in one direction while he hits us someplace else.”
“Can we pinpoint his location?” Berndt asked.
“The CIA is working on it,” McGarvey said.
“Fine,” the national security adviser said as if the decision had already been made. “As soon as we have that, we strike him with cruise missiles.”
“It didn’t work in ’ninety-eight,” McGarvey pointed out softly.
“Because of faulty intelligence information,” Berndt shot back. “If you do your job right this time, we’ll be able to do ours.”
“How soon can we be ready to make such an attack?” the President asked Admiral Halverson.
“The Carl Vinson and her battle group are already in the Indian Ocean. They could be in striking range in the Arabian Sea within forty-eight hours.”
“Is that enough of a force to deliver a decisive knockout punch?”
“Providing we know exactly where bin Laden is hiding, yes, sir. We can put upwards of one hundred fifty cruise missiles on target in under twenty minutes.” Admiral Halverson looked at McGarvey as if he were expecting to be challenged. “If need be we can finish the job with air-launched smart bombs.”
The President’s lips compressed. “Okay, that’s an option. Mr. McGarvey, comments?”
“There is another consideration, Mr. President, perhaps the only consideration.” McGarvey brought Rencke’s briefing file up on the screen at the end of the room. The three-dimensional engineering diagram appeared. “This is the Russian version of our Mark XVII nuclear demolitions device. The serial number that bin Laden sent back with Trumble matches the serial number of a Russian device that is missing.”
The entire room was stopped dead. Even the President was at a loss for words.
“We believe with a high degree of confidence that bin Laden purchased it from Russian caretaker officers at the Yavan Depot near Dushanbe, Tajikistan, for thirty million dollars. We think that it was taken across the border into Afghanistan near Nizhny Pyandzh two months ago where it disappeared. Currently the Russian FSB is conducting an investigation to find out what happened.”
Everyone around the table stared at the image on the screen. The President was the first to look back at McGarvey.
“This is a nuclear weapon?” he asked, subdued.
“Yes, sir.”
“Officially they don’t exist,” Secretary of Defense Turnquist said uncomfortably.
“They were supposed to have been destroyed,” Secretary of State Eugene Carpenter explained softly. Nearing eighty he was the oldest man currently serving in a position of power in Washington. His quiet, studied views were well respected here and abroad, especially in countries like China where old age was venerated. “Do you understand wha
t could happen if you’re correct, and this madman has one of the things?” He shook his head because of the enormity of what they were facing. “We have no defense.”
“We built a hundred of them,” McGarvey said. “We think the Russians built a similar number in the mid to late seventies. Ours were designed at Los Alamos and put together at the Pantex facility in Texas, and so far as I know, Mr. Secretary, they still exist.”
“And you’re telling us that bin Laden has one of these things?” The President glanced at the diagram again. He was shaken to the core. “What’s he going to do with it? Doesn’t he need a missile or something to deliver it?”
“No, Mr. President, because it’s not a bomb in the conventional sense of the word. It only weighs about ninety pounds, and it fits into a suitcase-size package. They were designed for behind the lines sabotage to take out major bridges, dams, submarine pens and hardened bunkers for fighter aircraft.”
“Was it meant to be carried by a man?”
“A strong man, or maybe two of them to switch off. They could sneak up to the target in the middle of the night, hide the package somewhere close to their objective, and then withdraw.”
“How powerful is it?”
“About one kiloton, enough to do a very considerable amount of damage wherever it was fired.”
“Just how much damage?”
“Mr. President, if it were loaded in the cargo hold of a commercial airplane and detonated over Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles, or any other large city, as many as a million people would die either from the actual blast and heat, or from the aftermath fires, or the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. Roads, schools, government buildings, radio and television stations, telephone towers and exchanges, power plants and distribution centers, satellite antennae—a major portion of a city’s infrastructure would be totally destroyed or heavily damaged in just one terrorist attack. It would make the Oklahoma City incident look like a toy popgun.”
“Just wait a minute,” Berndt broke in. “You don’t just walk up to an international airport carrying a nuclear weapon and board the first flight to New York.”
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