by Dalton Fury
“This is us,” Curtis said, tapping on a building with the tip of his pen. “Now, moving over here to the west, along the eastern bank of the Nile, you see these buildings here.” He scrolled the satellite image over and zoomed in on a long, low building separated from a square, taller structure, both surrounded by a parking lot. By zooming in again Curtis revealed a fence around the complex, protecting the two buildings on three sides from the large Kornish al Nile and two smaller residential streets. On the fourth side of the building was the Nile River itself. “This complex here is the warehouse and offices of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd. We are calling the warehouse here at the northern part of the property location Rhine, and the three-story office building here at the south location Stone. According to intel reports, Maadi Land and Sea is run by ex-members of the Jamahiriya Security Organization. Saleh’s men. We think it is very possible the missing SA-24s brokered by Saleh are brought via boat up the Nile or truck from the west from those hidden caches in Libya and Egypt, stored in the warehouse at Maadi Land and Sea, before then flying out of Cairo or, when moved in larger quantities, traveling overland to seaports.”
Hawk asked, “Why don’t you just let the Egyptian police know? Have them roll up the Libyans.”
“Reasonable question. Number one, we don’t know how good our intel is. It’s from a reliable source, but it’s nowhere near one hundred percent. Number two, if this is Saleh’s shipping point to his customers, there’s a good bet they are paying off local officials to look the other way. We can’t risk compromising our operation by just sending up a flare to the Egyptians. If Saleh and his boys scatter, we’ll just have to start all over. Our best bet is to find out who is involved, confirm the existence of the SAMs here in Cairo, and shut this transfer point down.”
Hawk nodded.
“We’ve been here three days already. Our surveillance in that time has revealed the same group of men coming and going from the building. We haven’t gotten eyes on Saleh, so we don’t think this is his actual base of operations, but the men we have seen might well be JSO operatives. We’ve managed to ID a second location these guys own in the neighborhood, a private residence nearby on Ibrahim Khedr Street, and I have secured an apartment near there for the purposes of static surveillance, but so far it looks like a dry hole, as we haven’t seen any activity there.
“We have tailed Saleh’s men to malls, we’ve seen them go to restaurants and venture into and out of other public places. We assume they aren’t just kicking back and enjoying themselves. We think they are on the job.”
Kolt said, “Clandestine meetings. Brush passes. Dead drops.”
Curtis nodded. “That’s what we figure. But I don’t have the assets here to tail all these subjects. Every one of my team has been close enough to the subjects that, if we just go plop down in a restaurant next to them or follow them into a shoe store, we are going to get ID’d in seconds.”
Slapshot said, “If you feel that way, your recce assets are likely burned already. Why the need to get so close?”
“We’re looking for Saleh himself, or any known personality from JSO, and they’ve made themselves hard to ID. JSO did an outstanding job of destroying personnel records in the dying days of the Gaddafi regime, so, other than a few top guys of the ex — spy agency, we are all but flying blind on IDing their men.”
Kolt asked, “Where did your intel come from?”
“About the JSO’s involvement in the SAM smuggling? Much of it came from Tripwire.”
Kolt was surprised. The last time he saw Dr. Renny Marris he did not seem like he was about to start sharing his secrets with the Central Intelligence Agency.
And something else did not make sense to Kolt. As Curtis began speaking again, Raynor interrupted. “If Saleh and his people knew Tripwire was on to them, which they obviously did if they targeted him for termination, why did they not close up shop here and relocate when he escaped?”
“They identified Tripwire through his source in their organization. But this source did not know about Maadi Land and Sea.”
“How do you know this?”
“The same crew that went after Tripwire, the crew you and your colleagues…” — he struggled to find the word — “disabled … also killed an officer in Libya’s new army. A general named Younis.”
“So?”
“So this General Younis was Tripwire’s informant. Younis originally worked with the JSO, helping them take possession of caches of SA-24s. He used army assets to move shipments of missiles to port in Benghazi, and he was paid handsomely for it. But someone on his staff tipped off Marris, and Marris approached Younis. Fearing he was going to take the fall for every plane that got blown out of the sky for the next two decades, the general told Marris what he knew about the Aref Saleh Organization.”
“And then?”
Curtis shrugged. “We speculate Marris told his superiors at the UN, and then someone at the UN informed on Younis to Saleh’s organization.” Curtis shrugged. “It happens. The UN isn’t exactly known for keeping secrets. Anyway, the general was pulled out of his Toyota Land Cruiser in front of his dentist’s office, tortured for two days in a disused air raid shelter in Tripoli, and then sliced and diced to bits in a threshing machine at a farm twelve klicks south of the city.”
“Jesus,” Hawk mumbled.
“Libya has excellent torturers. We feel certain the general told them about his contact with Marris, and that’s why Marris was targeted. But even though the general knew some of the players in Saleh’s group, and even though he knew the locations of some of the caches in Libya, he did not know anything about Saleh’s operation here in Cairo, so the Libyans knew he could not have told the UN about that. They figured they were safe.”
Kolt said, “Curtis, I am getting the impression that the only reason you had us roll Tripwire out of Libya was so that you could rifle through his papers.”
Myron Curtis smiled a sly smile. “What can I say, Racer? On that day in Tripoli, there were a lot of winners. It was my call to save Tripwire, and my call to scoop up the files in his office before the JSO got there to take a look at everything the UN knew about them. Still, we didn’t hit a home run that day. If you and your boys hadn’t shot up the Old City like it was Dodge City, we might have had time to raid the caches near Tripoli and take some of the missiles off the market.”
Kolt sighed. If Curtis had been on the scene in the Old City when those long blades came out, Kolt had no doubt in his mind that the CIA man would have been screaming for his best buddies in Delta Force to waste everything that moved in a three-block radius.
But Raynor let it go. He was going to have to work with this guy, after all. “So, if you didn’t learn about Maadi Land and Sea from Tripwire, what led you here?”
Curtis strummed his fingers on the desk. It seemed to Raynor like the CIA man preferred to hold his cards close to his chest. But after a moment he said, “I’m no Renny Marris, but I was in Libya trying to track down weapons myself. I found out about a shipment of SAMs in the port in Benghazi that sailed to Cairo, but I missed it here by a couple of days. The size of the shipment led me to believe they would travel by container ship, and not aircraft, to the end purchaser, so I went up to Port Said and found a bill of lading that matched my intel on the travel of the SAMs. But again, I missed the cargo itself. Langley is looking for the boat even as we speak.
“The bill of lading said the cargo was Egyptian machine parts heading to Slovenia, but I knew the cargo came from Libya, not Egypt, and everybody knows that Libya only exports two things to Europe, oil and immigrants. Anyway, I followed the paper trail and found out the company that paid for the shipment was a shell with a post box here in Maadi. I came here, watched a guy picking up some mail at the box, and trailed him back to his car. He came back to Maadi Land and Sea, so I looked into that name in our database. That company had been tied to Libyan external security by Langley in the past. After a couple of days of surveillance around Land and Sea we began to su
spect this to be a transfer point for some of the weapons. The property has shady guys coming and going, a lot of warehouse space, and a lot of security.”
Raynor then asked, “How big a shipment of missiles are on that boat that left Port Said?”
“Big. Very big. From the size of it we think there could be as many as fifty.”
“Fifty SAMs! And you let it get away?”
Curtis shrugged. “Sue me, dude. I had two guys and next to no assets. There are teams, just like mine, spread all over the globe trying to prevent the proliferation of Libyan munitions, and I got closer than they did. Don’t worry. We’ll find the SAMs, hopefully while still on open water, and we’ll get the SAMs off the market.”
Raynor sighed. He’d been saddled with missions that were poorly supported, and he’d bitched and moaned about that in his past. He was not going to judge Curtis for less-than-stellar results when dealing with the same bureaucratic BS that Kolt had complained about for years. Curtis had come to Cairo short on personnel and short on resources, and he managed not only to find the Libyans but to track one of their shipments to the port and ID the vessel.
“Okay. How can we help you?” Kolt asked.
“I have two case officers with me, plus the two SAD paramilitary guys for security. That’s not enough warm bodies to accomplish what I need to accomplish. The local station is up to their eyeballs in the political cluster fuck that is Egypt these days; they only had a couple of young case officers they are loaning me for surveillance from time to time. So I ordered up you guys to bolster the investigation.”
“What are you doing now surveillance-wise?”
“Right now we have covert video of the entrance to Maadi Land and Sea. The camera is mounted in a tree across the street in a private garden. We monitor the feed here, and it shows us what comes and what goes. I rotate one of my men out into the little parks in the neighborhood, and we use the feed at the front gate so we can tail subjects leaving when possible. What we need from you is as much intel on the physical property of Maadi Land and Sea as we can get. Maadi is a community with a lot of expats, so a husband-and-wife couple walking the streets aren’t going to stick out the way my guys do. A couple of tourists wandering the sights of Cairo will melt into the surroundings easily. Even if the Libyans get lucky and you are seen more than once, assuming it’s in public places, it won’t be a big deal.”
“What about us?” asked Digger.
Kolt answered before Curtis. He didn’t need the CIA man command-and-controlling his operators’ every move. “Surveillance and support and on-call close-target recce.”
“Sounds like a blast,” said Digger.
Curtis did not like Kolt answering for him. “That plus hopefully we’ll get the okay to have you guys do your ninja routine and infiltrate the warehouse, that’s objective Rhine, and get a look at what’s inside.”
Raynor shook his head. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. One step at a time.”
Curtis stood, indicating the end of the briefing. “Of course, Racer. Of course.”
SIXTEEN
The next morning Kolt and Cindy drove their rented Daewoo four-door sedan on the Kornish al Nile, the Nile river road that passed by the wall in front of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd. The two Americans could see the top two floors of the office building behind the wall, but the warehouse itself was out of view. They did get a glimpse of a gatehouse at the front of the building with a uniformed man behind the glass.
“This isn’t good enough,” Kolt said. “We’re going to have to go foxtrot.”
Hawk agreed. “On foot it is.”
They found a place to park a few blocks south of their target, and activated the covert 360-degree cameras that provided live feed into their cell phones. If anyone tampered with their car, they’d know about it.
They then strolled back up the Kornish al Nile, turning into a small green space on the far side of the busy street from Maadi Land and Sea. They spent a few minutes staring into the shops through the large windows. They weren’t eyeballing the sale items, but studying the opposite side of the street through the reflection of the window glass. Focusing directly on the target area would easily be picked up by a trained team of countersurveillance, and although they would be able to assess the skills of the enemy over time, for right now they needed to give their adversary the benefit of the doubt.
They took a few pictures of each other here, trying to get the front gate in the frame, though there was not much they could tell from street level.
As they strolled hand in hand out of the park, Hawk noticed an eight-story apartment building to the east of them. “I bet the balconies on those higher floors would get us what we need.”
Raynor nodded, and they headed that way.
* * *
Real estate agent Sharif Farouk whipped his seven-year old Mercedes coupe off Kornish al Nile and into the lot of one of the nine condominium buildings in Maadi that bore a sign in the lobby with his cell phone number. Anytime he had vacancies available in a building he always posted a sign, even if passersby in the market for a $3,000-a-month unfurnished condo were few and far between.
The woman who’d called him less than an hour before was Canadian; she explained that she and her husband were here on their honeymoon and had been so taken with the lushness and tranquillity of Maadi that they were considering leasing a home here.
Sharif was all too happy to cancel a lunch meeting and shoot across the city to meet with the Canadians.
He found the polite young woman attractive and her rudimentary command of his language equally adorable. Her dark hair, slight Asian eyes, and bright smile had him captivated from the moment he shook her hand in the foyer of the building, a forgettable eight-story structure with electrical issues and twenty-five percent vacancy stats that were seriously cutting into Farouk’s monthly commission.
Though he found the wife lovely, Sharif’s impression of the husband was that he was cold and impersonal. Other than a limp handshake, Frank Tomlinson just stared out the window of the lobby and then stood quietly with his hands in his pockets as his wife asked Sharif about the neighborhood during the ride up the elevator. Sharif got the impression that Mrs. Carrie Tomlinson was in the driver’s seat as far as wanting a second home in Egypt.
Mr. Tomlinson looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.
Sharif switched to English for the tour of the penthouse unit with a view of the river. He regularly showed homes to expatriates in Maadi, so, along with English, he was required to know French and a smattering of German for his job. As they went from room to room, Mr. Frank Tomlinson wandered off to the long balcony and stood outside, staring morosely at the Nile. Seeing this as an opportunity to both deflect the wife from noticing the water damage in the inlaid parquet flooring in the dining room and simultaneously winning over the husband who, Sharif assumed, held the purse strings in the relationship, he followed Frank outside and beckoned Carrie to follow.
“You see? It is a very beautiful view. The sunsets here are amazing.”
Mrs. Tomlinson gushed and hugged her husband, and Mr. Tomlinson did little more than snort.
Soon, Sharif and Carrie were back inside looking over the master bedroom and the master bath and the two small bedrooms that Sharif angrily noted smelled like mold had crept in from the neighboring unit, where a leak in the water line had gone unnoticed by maintenance for weeks because the condo was unoccupied.
Soon they were back in the lobby downstairs, Carrie had brochures of the property and the business card of the real estate agent, and then Sharif Farouk walked the beautiful and chatty Carrie and the brooding Frank back out into the hot summer sun, having no illusions that he would ever hear from them again.
* * *
“Wow, Frank,” Hawk said as they headed back to their car. “I guess I married a jackass.”
Kolt just smiled as he walked, aware that the agent might still be watching them. Softly he said, “Well, Hawk, I’ve never h
ad another operator squeeze my butt cheek in the middle of an op before.”
“No?”
“Not that I recall, anyway.”
“Yeah, maybe that was a little much. I was trying to lighten the mood, but I think it made Sharif a little uncomfortable.”
Kolt let her off easy. “No worries, the less I said, the more he would focus on you. I needed some privacy.”
“How did you do?” she asked.
Kolt did not answer till they got into the car. As he pulled back onto the Kornish al Nile he replied, “Video and stills of the entire complex, tag numbers on most of the vehicles in the parking lot, shots of the sentries and their gear, and close-ups on a couple of upper-management-looking types who were standing on the veranda smoking.”
“Awesome,” she said, “but I thought we were going to emplace the vehicle observation point to get that footage.”
Kolt hesitated before saying, “Is that what you learned in San Diego? Half the work here is instinct, Hawk. Not high-tech. By-the-book streetcraft isn’t always the answer.”
Cindy nodded.
“You did pretty good, though. You were in character. You sensed what I needed from you and you kept that guy occupied. Nice work.”
“Thanks, Frank,” she said with a grin. “A piece of cake. Pretty much exactly the type of ops we went through in training.”
“They don’t all go down that easily,” Kolt warned her.
Cindy said, “Racer, when I kissed you, I put my hand on that scar on your scalp. Mind if I ask how you got that?”
“Not at all. Mind if I don’t answer?” he said without looking at her.
Kolt thought back to the previous year and the hit on the Sandcastle near Peshawar. He’d wear a tattered scar on the back of his head for the rest of his days to help him remember that day. His hair covered it, but when he got his annual military cut for his Department of the Army official photo it would show for a couple of weeks.