by Vince Flynn
“Mitch, the train has already left the station.” She pointed at the TV. The screen showed a reporter standing in the White House press room. “The background has already been given to the press. The president is going to read a statement any minute. This is election-year politics. The president wants it both ways. A tough public prosecution of these two guys will give him a lot of good P.R., while at the same time assuage the concerns of the far left over the Patriot Act.”
Rapp shook his head at the TV. “Mustafa Frickin’ al-Yamani is on the loose somewhere in America. We have a dead Arab in a parking garage in Charleston, we have a missing Pakistani nuclear scientist arriving in Atlanta on Monday, and coincidentally the two guys we picked up in Charleston yesterday also happen to be from Atlanta.” Rapp paused, his silence exuding frustration. “Has it occurred to anyone else that the two men who the FBI have in custody just might be able to help us track down al-Yamani and this nuclear scientist?”
Kennedy shared his frustration; she knew there was no way the Justice Department would allow anyone from the CIA, let alone Mitch Rapp, to get anywhere near their two precious prisoners. Her protégé was now officially on the warpath and she had no interest in stopping him. “You’ll have to ask the president about it. Just try and be respectful,” she said.
ATLANTA
The second motel wasn’t as nice as the first. The carpeting was stained and matted, and the bedspreads were stiff and shiny. Imtaz Zubair did not complain. To do so in front of al-Yamani would have been foolish, especially since the man was in the bathroom throwing up. He was dying of radiation poisoning, that was obvious.
Zubair had seen it before when he worked at the Chasnupp nuclear power plant in Central Pakistan. There had been a minor leak that had been missed by a faulty sensor. A technician had continued to work in the contaminated area for an entire shift before it was discovered. By then it was too late.
Within a day the man was vomiting and had blotchy burn marks on his skin. Then came the swollen eyes, the agonizing spasms of pain, and finally the man’s hands had turned to gelatin and he had bled to death from the inside out. Zubair still remembered the screams. What a terrible way to die.
Zubair sat at the foot of the bed and stared at the TV. He had been ordered to tell al-Yamani when the American president came on. According to the reporter they were running behind schedule, but expected him any minute.
When the president finally stepped behind the podium, Zubair called to al-Yamani. A second later he came out of the bathroom, wiping his mouth with a towel. Zubair noticed a dab of blood on the white towel and asked, “Is there anything I can do to help ease your burden?”
Al-Yamani shook his head and sat down on the edge of the bed. He was very interested in what the American leader would have to say. The president was joined by several people—two men and a woman.
“I have a brief statement, and then I’ll field one or two questions before I turn things over to Attorney General Stokes.” The president looked down at the podium for a moment and then back up at the cameras. “Yesterday the Department of Justice and the FBI foiled a major al-Qaeda terrorist attack that was designed to target Washington, D.C. As has been reported by the press, this attack involved the shipment of explosive devices aboard multiple international container vessels. Through the hard work and quick actions of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and Department of Defense, this attack was thwarted, and in the process al-Qaeda has been dealt a serious blow. Terrorist cells located here in the United States have been identified and arrests are ongoing. Now I will take only a few questions and then Attorney General Stokes has a statement to make.” The president pointed into the crowd of reporters.
A slender man with prematurely gray hair stood and asked, “Mr. President, is it true that you and senior members of your administration were evacuated from the city on Tuesday night?”
“As a standard precautionary measure that falls under the continuity of government program, certain people were evacuated from the city and moved to secure undisclosed locations.”
“Were you one of those people?”
The president grinned. “For security reasons I will neither confirm nor deny.” He pointed to another reporter.
“Mr. President.” A woman stood up this time. “Can you confirm that this attack was to take place on Saturday during the dedication of the new World War Two memorial, and if so what extra measures will you put into place to protect the foreign heads of state who will start arriving tomorrow to honor the men and women who fought in the war?”
“For starters, al-Qaeda is on the run. They just gave us their best shot, and we stopped them in their tracks. As far as specific intelligence pointing to this Saturday’s dedication…we have seen nothing that would lead us to that conclusion. I’ll take one more question.”
A group of reporters began shouting questions and the president picked one. The others were immediately silenced and the one who remained standing asked, “What type of explosive devices are we talking about, sir?”
The president shook his head. “The investigation is ongoing, so I can’t get into specifics.”
A woman appeared from off camera and reached for the president. The president thanked the reporters for his time and then left. A man al-Yamani recognized as the attorney general stepped up to the podium and began to speak. Al-Yamani didn’t need to hear any more.
He turned off the TV and said, “It is time to go.”
“Are we coming back?”
“No.”
Zubair offered to drive but al-Yamani declined. They got in the rental car and left the seedy motel. Al-Yamani was eager to get rid of the rental car. Keep severing ties, he told himself. As long as he did that, the Americans would have no chance of catching him, and he could prove the president’s victory speech premature.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Rapp rarely thought of his job in terms of love or hate. It was a vocation, a duty, and not something that was easily affected by his moods, good or bad. There was only commitment to a cause in which he truly believed. There were, however, aspects of his job that he did not enjoy and increasingly took steps to avoid. One of them was coming to the White House.
For starters, Rapp and the president’s chief of staff could barely tolerate each other. She was an impediment to every strategy or action he tried to advise the president on. The fact that politics weighed so heavily in every decision simply did not compute for Rapp. It should not have come as a surprise to him that in a town like Washington and in a place like the White House, politics played such an important role but, in an irritating and undermining way, it did.
Add to all of that a convoluted, misguided, and rabid political correctness that permeated nearly every meeting, and you were left with an environment in which the inconsequential was debated and dissected, and the issues of real importance were obfuscated and put off for someone else to deal with at a later date. It was not the type of place where a man of action felt at ease, but it was nonetheless where Mitch Rapp found himself on this Thursday morning in May, sitting in the Cabinet Room with a painting of Teddy Roosevelt appropriately looming over his shoulder. His surly mood had not abated, but for Irene’s sake he was working to conceal it. All but four of the eighteen leather chairs were occupied. The national security team was assembled and waiting on their commander in chief to join them.
President Hayes entered with a smile on his face and a jovial bounce to his step. Everyone immediately stood, even Rapp, though he didn’t feel like it. As the president walked past him, he squeezed Rapp’s shoulder as a sign of his gratitude. So far he had not had the chance to thank him personally.
Hayes continued around the table to his chair that was positioned facing portraits of Lincoln and Jefferson. Chief of Staff Valerie Jones, never far from her master, took the vacant chair to the president’s right. The thought occurred to Rapp, not for the first time, that it would have been more fitting for her to be seated on his left. Attorney Gene
ral Stokes entered next and was followed by a tall blonde who Rapp assumed was this Stealey woman McMahon had told him about. So intense was Rapp’s resentment of this woman that he failed to notice her obvious beauty. The Department of Justice officials took their seats opposite the president and then everyone sat.
Rapp had watched part of the press conference in Kennedy’s limo and it was obvious that Attorney General Stokes was riding high on the accolades he’d received from the president. After National Security Advisor Haik announced the agenda, Paul Reimer from the Department of Energy took over.
Holding a yellow legal pad in his hands the man in charge of the Nuclear Emergency Support Teams began on a very sober note by saying, “Our scientists have concluded that if the various components that we intercepted had actually been assembled, the device would in fact have obtained a yield in the twenty-kiloton range.” Reimer cleared his throat and added, “A nuclear weapon of that size would have destroyed the capital and killed over a hundred thousand people in the initial burst. In the following month that number would double due to the radiation effects.”
A morbid silence fell over the meeting. Somewhat used to dealing with these scenarios strategically, General Flood was the first to move on. “Have you figured out where this thing came from?”
“That’s the million-dollar question,” replied Reimer. “Twenty KT is not significant by nuclear bomb standards, but by no means is it small. Attribution for the special nuclear material could take up to six months, but there are certain design geometrics that lead us to believe the weapon is of Soviet origin.”
The president sensed there was more. “You sound a little shaky in your assessment.”
“We have a slight disagreement among several of our scientists at the moment, but we’re ninety percent confident that the weapon is in fact Soviet made.”
“What’s the other ten percent saying?”
“There is a slight possibility that it is one of the Pakistanis’ early prototype designs.”
The president looked at his secretary of state, briefly, and then back at Reimer. “Based on some of the intelligence we’ve already gathered I would be inclined to think the chances of this thing being Pakistani would be much higher.”
“It’s that intelligence, sir…the missing scientists in particular…that is causing us to leave the door open on the Pakistani issue. From a purely scientific standpoint, we are very confident that it’s Soviet.”
“Why?”
Reimer looked at the other attendees before answering, and then turned his attention back to the president. “As I said, it will take us six months to figure out exactly where this material originated, to fingerprint, in other words, the exact reactor where the SNM was made, but that is not the only way to identify the origin. The other method is through design analysis. At first we were thrown by this weapon. We’d never seen anything like it, which led us to believe that it was possibly an early Pakistani design that we knew nothing about. This was where the minor dissent, if you will, originally started. With the design.
“We ran the design through the computers and came up with nothing. Typically weapons with yields in the ten to twenty range tend to be designed for torpedoes, cruise missiles, or artillery shells. This weapon does not fit that design geometry profile. We were running out of ideas when one of our senior scientists remembered a series of tests that the Soviet Union conducted during the late sixties and into the mid-seventies.”
Reimer flipped through a thick file and asked, “How many of you are familiar with the Kazakh test site?”
General Flood and Director Kennedy were the only two people who raised their hands.
Reimer held up a map. “The Kazakh test site is located in western Kazakhstan on the northern edge of the Caspian Sea. From 1949 to roughly 1990 the Soviets conducted 620 known nuclear explosions at this site. That is approximately two thirds of all Soviet tests. Over 300 megatons of nuclear weapons were exploded at this one range alone. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of roughly 20,000 Hiroshima bombs and nearly twice the amount of all U.S. tests.”
Rapp only heard the first part. His mind fixed on it. He leaned forward in his chair and raised his hand to get Reimer’s attention. “Paul, you said this test site is located on the northern edge of the Caspian.”
“That’s right.”
“You might be interested to know that when we raided the al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan one of the things we found was a map of the Caspian region.”
Reimer’s thick eyebrows arched in surprise. “Could you send it to me when we’re done?”
“Absolutely.”
Reimer jotted a quick note and then continued saying, “From the late sixties to the mid-seventies the Soviets tested a series of atomic demolition munitions. ADMs. We don’t know a lot about these because they were not designed for military purposes.”
“Then what were they for?” asked the president.
“A significant part of the Kazakh test site is rich in salt deposits. The idea behind these tests was to create extremely cheap and large underground storage facilities for oil, natural gas, and radioactive waste.”
“Did it work?”
“No. A Soviet scientist who was involved in the program defected in 1979, and gave us detailed information about the results. Our scientific people looked into it and agreed that it was something that wasn’t worth pursuing.”
“So how would al-Qaeda get their hands on this bomb?” the president asked.
In Reimer’s mind there were only two possibilities. One of them, that the Soviets had sold the material, was extremely remote, and he wasn’t about to throw it out in front of this group until he knew more. The other possibility, that al-Qaeda actually retrieved the material from the test site themselves, was more likely, but there were others at the table who were in a better position to answer, so he said, “I’m not sure, Mr. President.”
Secretary of State Berg leaned forward and looked at CIA Director Kennedy. “We need to get the Russians involved.”
“I agree. They can lean on the Kazakhs better than we can.”
The president looked across at Flood. “General?”
“I concur. They don’t want this stuff floating around any more than we do. They might not tell us everything they find, but they’ll deal with the problem.”
“What does that mean exactly?” asked Jones.
“On something this big,” Flood answered, “people will be marched in front of a firing squad, and if they want to save themselves and their families they’ll be given one last chance to confess.”
Rapp simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make his opinion on a related matter known. “You mean like we should do with the two guys we picked up in Charleston.”
If anyone other than Rapp had made the comment, there would have been a smattering of laughter, but because it was him, everyone assumed correctly that he meant it.
President Hayes decided to let the comment pass. He had been warned by Kennedy that Rapp wouldn’t like the move by the Justice Department, but he knew when he had the opportunity he’d be able to talk some sense into him.
“It goes without saying that we need to keep all of this very quiet,” Hayes said. “So far the press has no idea just how destructive this weapon could’ve been, and I stress the word could. I’ve talked to Paul about this.” The president glanced at Reimer. “This device was never fully assembled, and even then, it would have had to have been put together by someone highly skilled or it would have never reached its full destructive power. Therefore, it is highly likely it would have been nothing more than a subatomic yield. So…for reasons that should be apparent to all of us, from this point forward the device will be referred to only as a dirty bomb in official circles.”
Rapp clenched and then flexed his hands in agitation. A disaster had been averted, but there was still real work to be done and instead they were playing word games. He couldn’t resist pointing out the obvious.
He looked down the length of the table. “Paul, would Dr. Imtaz Zubair be skilled enough to assemble the weapon so that it could obtain its optimal yield?”
Reimer nodded, “Yes.”
Chief of Staff Jones asked, “Who is Dr. Zubair?”
“He’s a Pakistani nuclear scientist who entered the country on Monday using a false passport.” Rapp looked directly at the president and then Jones. “You haven’t heard of him?”
“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” snapped Jones. “We’ve got a little bit more to worry about than the name of every terrorist who’s trying to attack us.”
“Val, after he arrived at LAX, do you know where he went?”
“No.” Jones began jotting down notes as if Rapp had already lost her attention.
“Atlanta.” Undeterred, Rapp turned to the attorney general and his deputy. FBI Director Roach, who was sitting next to Stokes, thought he knew what was coming and slid his chair back a bit to get out of the way.
“Do we know anyone else from Atlanta?” asked Rapp in an ominously calm voice. “Maybe a couple of Saudi immigrants who tried to pick up a nuclear bomb yesterday?”
Before the attorney general could answer Peggy Stealey asked, “What’s your point, Mr. Rapp?”
Rapp was caught slightly off guard that the blonde had answered for her boss but he returned her unwavering stare. “Do you think that just maybe those two guys you have locked up out in Fairfax might be able to tell us where to start looking for Dr. Zubair?”
“Mr. Rapp, our investigation is proceeding just fine, so I still don’t see your point.”
“Have you found Dr. Zubair?”
“No, Mr. Rapp, we haven’t, but rest assured we will.”
Rapp was not about to give up. “Forgive me if I don’t share your confidence.”