Balfour considered how his good fortune had run out, the fruits of his years of hard labor yanked out from beneath him. But he was a shrewd man. He had a plan. If all went well, in a few days he would be guaranteed years of anonymity and safety lived in the plush style to which he was accustomed, and which he so richly deserved.
Balfour pulled off his jacket and kicked his shoes onto the carpet. Two inches shorter, he crossed the room and opened the French doors. A sweeping vista of the foothills and mountains of the Hindu Kush greeted him. Somewhere up there was Emma Ransom. She had radioed that she was en route to the site of the weapon. In hours, she and her team would begin dismantling the missile.
Balfour returned to his desk and unlocked the top drawer. There, on top of his personal papers, lay the photograph of the American cruise missile. If the nuclear core could be successfully removed and brought down the mountain intact, its sale would earn him enough to live comfortably for quite some time.
One last deal and Ashok Balfour Armitraj, a.k.a. Lord Balfour, would disappear. His Swiss plastic surgeon would arrive shortly, and Count François-Marie Villiers would be born.
32
Connor had one avenue of attack and one only: CJSOTF-A. Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force—Afghanistan.
Traditional military units function according to a top-down hierarchy. A general at division level issues an order to a colonel commanding a battalion, who passes it along to a company commander, either a major or a captain, who with his men actually carries it out. In short, no one moves until his superior officer gives him an order.
Special Forces—Green Berets, Delta Force, SEALs, Air Force Pararescue, and Marines Special Operations Command—function differently. Unless specifically tasked, special operations forces deployed in a theater of war are responsible for generating their own missions. Instead of top-down, they work according to a bottom-up hierarchy. Commanders in the field, usually at the rank of captain, are given considerable discretion and latitude in planning the parameters and scope of their missions.
In Afghanistan, where Special Forces’ primary goal was to seek out and destroy enemy combatants, teams of ten to twenty men established outposts at far-flung locations and used these as bases from which to locate, track, and kill the enemy.
Connor sat down at a keyboard and logged on to JWICS. Civilians had the World Wide Web. The military had its own dedicated networks, and civilians were not welcome. JWICS, or the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, was reserved for top-secret or classified communications. Information available included a listing of all U.S. forces deployed around the world, down to battalion level. Connor navigated onto the page for the Joint Special Operations Task Force—Afghanistan. A colonel was in charge, but it was enlisted men who drove special ops. One man in particular held sway. In this instance, he was Marine Sergeant Major Lawrence Robinson and he ran the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram Air Base, thirty miles north of Kabul.
Connor thanked the Lord for this piece of luck.
Smiling inwardly, he rolled his chair over to the red phone. A red phone for the red line, a secure, encrypted line linking intelligence agencies, military installations, and embassies around the world.
“This is Sergeant Major Robinson.”
“Frank Connor at Division. You the same Robinson helped pull Saddam out of his spider hole a few years back?”
“You the same sonofabitch sent me to find him?”
“Hello, Larry. How they hangin’?”
“Two more years till I have my thirty in, then I’m coming to work for you.”
“Any time. Just remember to tell the wife you’re selling washing machines.”
Robinson cleared his throat. There was precious little time for levity. “Why don’t you give me your verification code, just for old time’s sake.”
Connor rattled off his ten-digit alphanumeric ID. He had visited the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram on more than one occasion. Waiting for his clearance, he envisioned Robinson standing at his perch on the raised platform that overlooked the rows of desks and wall-mounted video screens and the determined young men and women hard at work. At any one time, Robinson might be monitoring a Predator mission on one screen, a field interrogation on another, and a platoon engaged in combat on a third, all while signing off on the next day’s duty roster.
“And what can I do for Division this fine day?” asked Sergeant Major Robinson.
“We have some HVIs”—high-value individuals—“in transit on the border of the northwest tribal region traveling with a team of enemy combatants. We’ve been after these guys for a long time. We’re talking some extremely nasty individuals. Do you have a team in the area available for immediate dispatch?”
“Gotcha loud and clear, Frank. I have two Marine special ops teams working out of Korengal Valley. I’ll have to speak with the ground commanders to see who’s good to go. Hold for ten.”
Connor looked at Erskine and crossed his fingers. He knew better than to mention the missile. An HVI in the company of enemy combatants was a mouthwatering target. At this point, retrieving the missile could wait. Liquidating Balfour’s team was mission one. And that included Emma Ransom.
“I have Captain Crockett at Firebase Persuader patched in. Mr. Connor, go ahead.”
Frank Connor outlined the story as he chose to present it. A group of enemy combatants, including at least one individual figuring on the Terrorist Watch List, had been spotted in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. He had 100 percent visual confirmation as well as the precise coordinates where the targets had been seen a short time earlier.
“I’ve got a pair of Chinooks on the flight line powering up,” said Robinson. “ETA to Captain Crockett is one hour.”
The TOC was situated adjacent to the flight line at Bagram, and Connor imagined that Robinson could see the crews running to the large helicopters and the long twin rotors beginning to turn.
“One question, Mr. Connor,” said the Marine captain. “Should any effort be made to capture and interrogate either the combatants or the HVI?”
“Negative. They are to be considered armed and dangerous and will resist capture. Shoot to kill, captain.”
“Hoo-yah,” said the Marine.
Connor ended the call and looked at Erskine.
No death warrant was ever worded more clearly.
33
It was morning, and morning was when they did memorization games. Danni pulled a white cloth off the table and said, “Go.” Jonathan had ten seconds to look at and memorize as many of the objects on the four-foot-square table as possible. The first day she’d given him thirty seconds, the second day twenty. The amount of time he was allotted to observe and commit the items to memory kept decreasing while the number of items increased. Danni had a word for this method of training. She called it “elongating,” and said it meant pushing the envelope at both ends. Jonathan, ruled by his secret mantra to do everything better than anyone else, either before or to come, called it “bullshit” and struggled to increase his scores.
Ten seconds.
Jonathan regarded the assortment of dissimilar objects, registering each in turn, assigning it a letter or a numeral. C for candle. N for notepad. 1 for cell phone, because there was always a cell phone, therefore it was a constant. (The other constants were an alligator billfold, 2; a pair of sunglasses, 3; and a pack of breath mints, 4.) He estimated that there were twenty-five items on the table. Some were large and impossible to forget—a Colt .45 pistol, for example. But he had learned that these were put there to obscure his recollection of the smaller, more important things. It was these items he sought out first and branded into his memory: a flash drive disguised as a pen; a slip of paper with a twelve-digit phone number. (“Concentrate on the last eight digits,” Danni instructed him. “We can figure out the country later.”) A photograph of three men and a woman. (Two of the men were swarthy, with heavy mustaches, the third bald, with a birthmark on his left cheek. The
woman was red-haired, with sunglasses, and, oddly, topless.) A business card with Arabic script.
There were other assorted items, ranging from a flathead screwdriver to a ring of keys. And these his mind registered in a fleeting, once-over sweep.
“Time.”
Jonathan turned his back to the table, but not before Danni threw the cloth over the items, just in case he might have eyes in the back of his head.
The exercise was not over yet. To mimic real life as much as possible, Danni made him wait ten minutes to the second before he was permitted to recite the list he’d stored away. During that time, it was their practice to discuss the main stories taken from that morning’s edition of the Jerusalem Post. “Compartmentalization,” she called it. Carving up your mind into individual, hermetically sealed sections and putting a lock and label on each.
Today’s headlines were stolen from a world at war. The Israeli navy had boarded and seized a cargo ship under foreign flag in the eastern Mediterranean, which was carrying a devil’s arsenal of Iranian weaponry destined for Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon.
“Name the ship and the country of registry,” said Danni.
Jonathan had the reply at his fingertips. “Faring Rose. Norway.”
Riots had broken out again on the Temple Mount. More than two hundred policemen had been called to quell the violence.
“What’s everyone so damned mad about?” Danni asked.
“Access to the Temple Mount by Palestinians.”
“Who’s for or against?”
“People’s Party for …” Jonathan gave up. Israeli politics had always confused him. He found it no easier to follow now that he was in the country. “Next.”
The routine required that they stand face-to-face and maintain eye contact so that Jonathan could not engage in any mental gymnastics that might make recall easier. As Danni continued her tour of the headlines, Jonathan couldn’t help but notice a weariness tugging at her features. He’d read his share of similar stories and had become inured to them, yet the mournful cast to her eyes suggested that she’d lived them. He looked into those eyes and noticed the specks of green sprinkled on the blue irises. It was a warm morning, and she was dressed in shorts and a black tank top that matched the raven’s black of her hair. Her one concession to makeup was a coat of balm to heal her cracked lips. She smelled faintly of French perfume. For these observations his mind had no compartment, no lock or label. He experienced them wholly and without effort, even if he might have cared not to.
Danni continued. In Peshawar, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, three car bombs had exploded simultaneously near a military base. It was a story to which Jonathan had paid special attention. “How many dead?” she asked.
“Sixty confirmed. Three hundred injured. Both figures are expected to rise.”
“Who took responsibility?”
“A Taliban warlord.”
“Name?”
“Sultan Haq. He claimed the bombing was in retaliation for the murder of his father. I was there in the cave when he was killed. I saw him die.”
Danni looked up sharply. “You know Haq?”
“That’s where I was before I came here.”
“Haq was a prisoner in Guantánamo,” said Danni with hatred. “You released the wrong man.”
“Looks like it.”
Danni went back to her paper. “And who supplied the explosives?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jonathan. “Do you?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t Balfour, it was someone like him. Another cockroach that needs to be crushed. Balfour’s your focus. Let’s not forget why you’re here.”
Jonathan noted that his heart was beating faster, and he felt as if he’d taken a step closer to his target.
“Ready?” said Danni. “Begin.”
Still looking into her eyes, Jonathan recited the list of objects on the table. It ran to twenty-one items. He forgot only the fountain pen, the business card with Arabic script, and a tangerine. He also transposed the last two digits of the telephone number written on the slip of paper.
“Not bad,” said Danni. “Take five minutes, then we’re going back to the street. Maybe you can finally pick out someone who’s following you. I’m not optimistic.”
Jonathan spotted the first tail almost immediately. He was young and rangy with a mop of curly black hair and tattered jeans, and he was trying too hard to appear captivated by each store’s varied offerings. A sportsman might look closely at a display of fishing rods and boating equipment, but the same man could hardly be expected to find anything of interest in the fashion boutique next door. As proud as Jonathan was of having spotted the tail, he was prouder still of how he’d managed it. Looking around for ways to see behind him, Jonathan had caught the tail’s reflection in the window of a taxi stalled in the midday traffic. No look over his shoulder, no stopping to tie his shoe and glance surreptitiously behind him. Just a casual flick of the eyes to the taxi’s window—as clear as a mirror—and Jonathan had him. When Jonathan walked briskly, so did Curly Black Hair. When Jonathan slowed, his shadow slowed, too.
Number one down.
The time was half past twelve, and on this sunny afternoon, the Haifa waterfront was a hive of activity. Sidewalk cafés, curio boutiques, and thriving markets attracted a cross-section of the Israeli populace. Young, old, natives, Palestinians. It was a mix of ancient and modern, a slice of contemporary Israel. Danni knew how to pick her spots.
Jonathan passed the old clock tower as it rang the half-hour. On the corner, a bent vendor sold soft drinks and shawarmas from his cart. Jonathan bought a Coke, making conversation with the old man. As he did, he turned slowly and gazed up and down the street. Danni had instructed him to let his eyes do the walking, and Jonathan fought to keep his head still.
He picked out his second tail a block later. She was a thin middle-aged woman mirroring him on the opposite side of the street. She wore an orange smock and a straw sun hat, but they were camouflage. Five minutes earlier she’d been wearing a blue sweater and had her hair in a braid. It was her shoes that gave her away: clunky brown Mephisto hiking shoes that he’d picked up two blocks back.
He was learning.
Number two down.
He heard rather than saw the car approaching at speed to his rear. The engine revved high enough to hurt his ears, the noise growing louder each second. Still, he refused to yield to his curiosity. It was only when the black BMW nearly brushed against him that he jumped to one side and gave it his full attention.
The sedan pulled to the curb and the front door flew open. Danni jumped out and motioned for him to approach. Jonathan broke into a jog. “What is it?” he asked. “Did I do something wrong? It was the guy with curly hair and ripped-up jeans and the straggly lady in the straw hat.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Danni. “Get in.”
Jonathan was slow on the uptake. “But I got ’em,” he said proudly. “I actually figured out who was following me.”
“Congratulations,” said Danni, without joy. “Get in the back. We’re late.”
Jonathan climbed into the rear seat and Danni slid in next to him. “Late for what?” he asked. “What’s going on? Did something happen?”
The car accelerated into traffic and Danni slapped a passport into his hand. “Change of plan. Things are moving faster than expected. We’re leaving the country.”
“When? I mean, where to?”
“The plane leaves in two hours,” said Danni, throwing up a tanned forearm and checking her watch. “Don’t worry. You’ll like where we’re going. It’s cold and there are mountains.”
34
Emma pulled the hood of her anorak further over her head and cursed the weather. The front she’d observed approaching from the east when taking off from Chitral had moved in more quickly than she’d expected. The temperature had plummeted twenty degrees, and for the last hour snow had been falling.
Burying her
ice ax into the slope, she watched the members of her team lumber past. “Oxygen working okay?” she asked, patting one of the nuclear physicists on the back.
The engineer grunted but did not slow.
“Not much farther,” she said. “Just up this slope.”
It was a pardonable lie. Ninety percent of climbing was mental. It was easier to break down the route into short, accomplishable segments. She stood in place, allowing the others to pass: the guide; the porters with their forty-kilo loads carrying tents and rations, and of course the toolboxes of sophisticated equipment that would be required to open up the missile and dismantle the payload; and finally the second physicist. She looked at him more closely. His face was knotted in pain, his stride wobbly. He was a thin man, and earlier she’d judged him fit by the sparkle in his eye and his serious manner. Now she saw that she was wrong. He was in bad shape.
They had been marching for six hours, with a respite every sixty minutes. From base camp at 4,500 meters, the trail had assumed a gentle grade across a firm snowfield. The first test came at the three-kilometer marker, where the snowfield abutted a massive icefall. Emma stopped the team to rope up and attach crampons and to say that if she saw anyone treading on the rope, she’d personally throw him off the nearest ledge. After that, all conversation died and the climb began in earnest.
The icefall resembled a gargantuan, fractured marble staircase and rose 250 meters over a couple of kilometers. The abject fear that comes when jumping over a crevasse or hearing the loud, godlike groaning of ice shifting below your feet sharpened everyone’s concentration. Thankfully, all managed to make it up without incident. From there the route led across the flank of the mountain, as if following the hem of a skirt, the snow once again firm beneath their crampons.
At noon they stopped for a lunch of lamb jerky, rice, and beans. Emma had forgotten the tedium of cooking at altitude. It took water thirty minutes to boil. Minute rice also needed half an hour. It was then that the complaints had started. The stocky engineer had blisters. She lanced them and put on antifriction salve and moleskin. The other engineer complained of a persistent leg cramp, which Emma massaged away by pressing her thumbs so deep into his calf muscles that she brought tears to the man’s eyes.
Rules of Attack Page 17