The Assassins

by Oliver North

  “Where is this guy—and how is he running this operation,” asked the President.

  Powers took over again where Goode left off. “We think that some of the command and control functions are being handled from Saudi Arabia, and partly from somewhere else, perhaps Tehran,” Powers said.

  “Saudi Arabia? How?” asked the President.

  “Some of it seems to be emanating from a Russian-owned facility in Riyadh.”

  “Russian...?” the President said, adding, “How do the Russians fit into this?”

  “Not the Russian government, sir,” Powers said. “We think it's a freelance project, run by this ‘retired’ KGB general, Komulakov. He apparently doesn't believe that the cold war ever ended.”

  “If we know where this place in Riyadh is, why don't we just level it?” asked the President.

  “Because we're trying to work out a way to flush out the other end of their communications links,” Powers said, then added, “but we need a little more time to accomplish that.”

  “I wonder how much time we have,” the President said, almost to himself. Then he stood up from the conference table to stretch his legs, restless from the long day of tense activity dealing with the crisis. After a moment, he sat back down and asked, “So all of the captured vessels and aircraft were modified to hold nuclear weapons, but we haven't found any of the nukes. Where are they?”

  Powers paused before responding and then he said very quietly, “We don't know. We've mobilized every available recon flight, UAV, satellite, and twenty-nine Special Operations teams. We have some decent leads on two more of the stolen Saudi aircraft, but nothing right now regarding anymore of the yachts. We're hoping that one of the captured terrorists will spill something during interrogation, but none of the prisoners seem to know anything about the mission except for their limited part in it—and for that they were apparently supposed to get instructions later. We're guessing that they were supposed to get the vessels and aircraft to a secure site—perhaps Caracas—so they could install the weapons next week.”

  “If there are so many indicators that Venezuela is a problem, should we consider a blockade or some other action?” asked the President.

  “George has a warning order out to Atlantic Command, Forces Command, and Southern Command,” answered Powers. “With your permission we'll start repositioning forces tonight, but unless we're attacked on Monday, I don't think we should take any overt action against Venezuela yet.”

  “Go ahead and move whatever's necessary,” the President said, “and let's see if we can keep it quiet.” Then he asked, “Why do you think next week is the ‘crunch point’? What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, we're not sure. Right now it's just a hunch—much of it is based on some information from one of Bill Goode's sources,” said the SecDef, nodding toward the CIA officer sitting across the table from him. “Bill seems to have a good handle on this number eleven business and why it's so important to the terrorists. If he's right, then George and I figure they'll need several days to a week to install the weapons and then pre-position their assets for a major attack.”

  “When?” asked the President.

  “Two weeks from tomorrow—the eleventh of November—the date of ‘eleven eleven.’”

  Newman Family Vacation Home

  ________________________________________

  Boot Key, FL

  Saturday, 27 October 2007

  2345 Hours Local

  By the time the weary travelers arrived at Blue Waters, the Newman vacation cottage in Boot Key, the children were sound asleep in the backseat. They had hoped to arrive hours earlier, but during their final stretch down the 120-mile-long string of islets, they were confronted by dozens of security stops.

  All day the news on the radio had been almost universally ominous. There were reports about curfews in most major cities. Martial law had been declared in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit where looting was the worst. When one reporter observed that most federal government offices would be closed on Monday and asked rhetorically, “Who's minding the store?” Rachel snapped the radio off and said in frustration to the now mute instrument, “Peter Newman is!”

  Just south of Marathon, they were held up for more than an hour so that a lengthy military convoy, headed south, could pass. A military policeman wearing a flak jacket and Kevlar helmet waved the Suburban and several other cars off the road. Interspersed among the passing camouflage-painted trucks and HETs (Heavy Equipment Transporters) were armored Humvees—with .50 cal. and 240 Golf machine guns mounted and manned in their turrets. Seeing that, Skillings said quietly, “Things are heating up.”

  “Why do you say that, Amos?” Rachel asked, trying to keep her voice low so they wouldn't wake the children in the backseat.

  “That's a Patriot PAC III battery,” replied Skillings. “It can be used against an air threat—but its principal purpose is to shoot down enemy missiles.”

  “Where are they headed?” asked Rachel, suddenly concerned that she was bringing her children closer to trouble rather than further from it, as she had intended.

  The Marine sergeant major thought for a moment, then said, “I don't know for sure, ma'am, but I'd guess that they're positioning them at Key West Naval Air Station.”

  “That's only a few miles from Boot Key,” said Rachel, increasingly anxious. “Why would that little base be a target for a nuclear attack?”

  “I doubt that it would be, ma'am,” said Skillings, trying to reassure her with the truth. “It's more likely that the Patriots are being put at NAS Key West to protect cities in the Southeast U.S. and along the Gulf Coast from air or missile attack from Cuba or somewhere else to our south.”

  “Where else?” Rachel pressed.

  “Don't really know,” the sergeant major responded honestly. Then after a moment he said, “Maybe Venezuela.”

  USS Jimmy Carter, SSN 23

  ________________________________________

  55° E, 24° N, King's Bay, GA

  Sunday, 28 October 2007

  0115 Hours Local

  Capt. Sanford “Sandy” Heflin had been waiting for almost four months for a mission like this—ever since he and his crew had sailed the SSN 23 from their home port in Bangor, Washington. He had begun to wonder if his highly complex sub, like its namesake, the first nuclear submariner to become president, would be sidelined without ever taking offensive action.

  The USS Jimmy Carter had been commissioned in February 2005, after all the major offensive action in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom was already over. Unlike so many other U.S. attack submarines, SSN-23—the third and final in the Seawolf class—had never fired any Tomahawk T-LAM cruise missiles at enemy targets.

  In two deployments to the Persian Gulf all they had done was sit on the bottom and use their sophisticated monitoring equipment to eavesdrop on other people's communications. But now, if the message he had just received from Washington was any indication, Capt. “Sandy” Heflin finally had a mission that would challenge his superbly trained crew and this magnificent boat.

  Heflin read the operative paragraph of the message again:

  SSN 23 WILL PROCEED FASTEST COURSE TO US NAV FAC BAHRAIN TO TAKE ABOARD ONE ASDS AND ELEVEN SEALS. WHEN DIRECTED BY CINC FIFTH FLEET, SSN 23 WITH EMBARKED PERSONNEL AND EQUIPMENT WILL CONDUCT COVERT OPERATION TO SEVER UNDERSEA FIBER-OPTIC CABLE CONNECTING AD DAMMAM SAUDI ARABIA TO BANDAR-E BUSHEHR, IRAN.

  Lt. Cmdr. Jack Hughes, his XO, looking over his shoulder said, “This is the kind of mission that the guys back in the '70s and '80s used to pull all the time against the Soviets.”

  “Yeah,” said Heflin, “my first CO used to talk about sneaking into Murmansk even before we had the Los Angeles class boats—and tapping the Soviets' old-fashioned ‘hardwire core’ cables.”

  “I remember at sub school,” added Hughes, “we had briefings on how our subs tapped them even after Moscow installed fiber-optic lines and digital switches carrying five gigabytes
per second and as many as 60,000 separate, simultaneous international phone calls. They even got stuff that was being put up on Eutelsat, Intelsat, Inmarsat, Intersputnik, and Orbita satellites.”

  “I must have missed that class,” said Heflin. “How did our subs tap into the fiber-optics without the Soviets finding out?”

  “Using the first generation of the equipment that we have aboard,” replied Hughes, pleased that he could impress his skipper. “Wizards like John Poindexter developed mathematical data-compression techniques and ‘artificial intelligence’ routines—and the on-board computers ‘learned’ which cables carried traffic of strategic or intelligence value. What's always amazed me is how long it took the Sovs to figure out we were there.”

  “Yeah, but in a way, our guys going into Soviet harbors had some advantages that we're not going to have on this mission,” said Captain Heflin.

  “How's that?” asked Hughes.

  “Well,” replied Heflin, “for one thing, places like the Seymorput Naval Yard have scores of nuclear-powered submarines coming, going, berthed, and in dry-docks, so there wasn't—isn't—much chance of the Russians picking up one of our subs with some kind of radiation detection.”

  “Well, the good news for us,” said Hughes, “is that today, less than a fourth of the Russian sub fleet is even operational. When we were going through our ‘refresher training’ I read that the hulls of forty-five of their most recent boats are no longer hermetic—if they take them to sea, there's a good chance they'll sink. After the fiasco with the Kursk, they found all kinds of problems at Gremikha. Something like fifty of their subs have depleted nuclear fuel and they can't afford to reactivate them. They are now using old nuclear subs and other ‘rust buckets’ in Murmansk Harbor just to store radioactive waste.”

  “And I thought that the reason Murmansk harbor didn't freeze over was global warming,” Captain Heflin said sardonically.

  Hughes, really into his subject, said, “The Russians have dumped entire reactors—at least eighteen of them—into the oceans. The last intelligence report I saw indicated that nearly 20,000 canisters of nuclear waste, hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid radioactive material…and about ten million curies worth of spent solid fuel rods are stored on those ships and subs in Murmansk Harbor.”

  “Yeah, well, we're not going into Murmansk Harbor on this run,” said Heflin, tiring of Hughes's encyclopedic recitation. “Let's find out what the Iranians have for an underwater listening capability—and where their Kilo class diesel-electric boats are. I don't want to bump into someone who doesn't like us while we're snipping their clothesline.”

  “Will do,” said the XO, taking notes. “Are we going to have to make any modifications to transport the mini-sub—the ASDS?”

  “Good question, XO,” said Heflin. “Get off a message to ComSubPac and ask 'em. I know that the ASDS is air-transported mounted on its own trailer rig, but I don't know if we have to make any changes to our hull to accommodate her.”

  “I know the cable says ‘When ordered,’ but do you have any guess as to the timetable on this?” asked Hughes.

  Heflin stood, looked at his XO, and said, “Given what's going on above the surface right now, I'd say ASAP—if not before.”

  IN THE

  CROSSHAIRS

  ___________________________________________________

  ___________________________________________________

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lourdes Signals Intelligence Facility

  ________________________________________

  Bejucal, Cuba

  Monday, 29 October 2007

  0757 Hours Local

  Dimitri Komulakov looked at the printed copy of the electronic message he had just received from Nikolai Dubzhuko, his operations officer in Riyadh. He set it beside the two transcribed intercepts that had been handed to him a half hour earlier by Col. Mikhail Vushneshko—the commander of the Russian Signals Intelligence unit at Lourdes. None of the news was good.

  Both of the transcripts Vushneshko had provided to Komulakov were from phone conversations grabbed out of the airwaves by Russian monitors on Saturday. The first was a cryptic call from Senator James Waggoner's cell phone to a Washington, D.C., telephone number, demanding to know when some kind of “Special Unit” would commence action and threatening to “have” someone's “rear end.” Komulakov recognized the crude American slang and dismissed the call as irrelevant.

  It was the second transcript that alarmed him—from a call made to Marine General Peter Newman's cell phone from another cell phone in Key West, Florida. The transmission had been monitored from both the Russian Embassy in Washington and at the Lourdes site. Of greatest concern to Komulakov was the reference to “troops.” It concerned the “retired” KGB officer enough that he'd asked Vushneshko if there were any signs of an American military buildup in Florida. He was only partially reassured by the answer: the Americans were conducting an air-defense exercise at their Naval Air Base, ninety miles to the north.

  Having dealt with the intercepts, Komulakov turned back to the most recently encrypted e-mail report he had received from Riyadh. It was increasingly apparent that the carefully concocted plans he had made with Ali Yunesi, the head of the Iranian Intelligence Service, were unraveling. Dubzhuko had now lost contact with four of the Saudi yachts and two of the aircraft that his teams had so carefully captured. He checked his watch—it was nearly eight in the morning in Cuba—just before four in the afternoon in Saudi Arabia. Despite his reluctance to use the Cuba-Murmansk-Moscow-Tehran-Riyadh fiber-optic voice link, he decided that he and his principal deputy simply had to talk. He picked up the phone and said to the operator, “Get Dubzhuko on the line for me.” Ten seconds later they were connected.

  “So, Comrade Nikolai,” he said, “have you been able to regain communications with any of the missing yachts or aircraft yet?”

  “No, General,” the former KGB colonel replied. “There are still the four ships and two aircraft that have not reestablished communications— and now another vessel that was off the coast of Algeria last night has failed to check in.”

  “And what are you doing to make sure that this does not continue to happen?” demanded Komulakov. “Are you certain that the crews you dispatched to bring these planes and boats to Caracas have not simply decided that they can make more by selling them than you were paying them, eh?”

  “That is most unlikely, General,” Dubzhuko responded indignantly. “First, each of the ships and aircraft had at least one of our loyal officers aboard to supervise the delivery to Caracas—and that's where they were to be paid. As you know, the rest of the crews—on the boats and the planes—weren't doing this for the money.”

  “So what happened to the missing boats and planes?” asked Komulakov.

  “I think we should consider the possibility that the Americans or their allies may have taken them.”

  “I agree,” responded Komulakov. “I am surprised that their press organs have not made an announcement to that effect, but we must plan accordingly. We are going to move up the delivery of the weapons. I want to get them to Caracas just as soon as possible. Have you talked to the pilots?”

  “Yes, they are two of our best,” answered Dubzhuko. “The plane is an Airbus 320 freighter—painted as ‘Air France Air Cargo.’ Right now it's in a hangar at Bandar Abbas, and the weapons are aboard in their containers. Their flight plan calls for them to refuel in Algeria, overnight in the Canary Islands, and into Caracas the next day.”

  “Why so many stops?” asked Komulakov.

  “For safety margins on fuel, crew rest, and because it is a more normal routing for such an aircraft and so is less likely to attract attention,” responded the deputy.

  “Very well,” said the general. “I shall call our employer and tell him that we are moving the weapons earlier than planned. Yunesi will be concerned. Should he or any of his ‘Islamic Brotherhood’ contact you, tell them that we are simply trying to make sure that
everything is in place for their special day.”

  Central Police Station

  ________________________________________

  Paddington Green, London

  Monday, 29 October 2007

  1205 Hours Local

  It was raining as the MI6 driver pulled up to the gate labeled “Authorized Personnel Only” at the Paddington Green High Security Police Station. He turned to the man in the backseat and said, “I'll be in the car-park across the street when you come out, sir.”

  “Very well, Johnson,” replied Joseph Blackman, pulling the collar of his trench coat up before exiting into the downpour. “I shouldn't be more than a half hour.” The MI6 officer closed the door of the Rover sedan, walked to the small gate through the forty-two-inch high cast-iron fence surrounding the station, showed his ID badge to the blue-uniformed guard just inside the portal, and was admitted into the building.

  Rather than take the lift, Blackman strode up one flight of stairs and down the quiet corridor to an office door labeled, “Chief Inspector Evan Hadley, Director, Counter-Terrorism.” Not indicated on the sign was another, unmentioned title: Hadley was also the chief liaison between the police and MI5—the British domestic Intelligence Service. Blackman knocked twice on the door, entered an anteroom, and was escorted by a young woman in civilian clothes into Hadley's office.

  “Joseph, thank you for coming on such short notice,” said Evan Hadley. “You know Michael Stevens of Scotland Yard, yes?”

  Blackman and Stevens shook hands and as all three men sat down, Hadley said, “I thought it would be good for the three of us to chat a bit since Stevens and I are getting a good bit of heat from the Home Office about all this ‘Islamic Brotherhood’ business.”

  “And unfortunately,” Stevens added, “the Yanks aren't being particularly forthcoming. Their Leg-Att—the FBI agent at their embassy—is fairly new and doesn't quite seem to have figured out the Anglo-American Special Relationship.' Evan suggested that since you communicate quite freely with your CIA counterpart—Goode's his name, isn't it?—that you might be able to share some insights with us.”