The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  “At worst, it would lead to reprisals, possibly even nuclear. At best, it would quarantine us until there is a regime change.”

  The imam sipped his tea slowly. It was so quiet his guest could hear the man’s beard rustle.

  “What do you propose?” he finally asked.

  “I am going to gather all available resources to find the device,” Yazdi said. “But the Society must be made aware of the risks—and the steps I must take.”

  Salehi regarded his companion. His eyes seemed darker than before beneath their thick white brows. “You wish to contact foreign intelligence agencies? Warn them? I am not sure I could sanction that.”

  “No, Imam,” he said quickly. “Many of them would never believe that we are not involved.”

  “Then what?”

  “To begin with, I want to wake a sleeper who is deep in American intelligence. Qf-3.”

  “A letter of the alphabet? Is that all you know of him?”

  “In fact, that is all I know,” Yazdi admitted. “No one knows the names of our sleepers, not even in my office. “

  “I assume that is a prudent way to run your organization?”

  Yazdi ignored the elder’s sarcasm. Even the good Experts thought they knew more than they did.

  “It is essential that he have what we call ‘plausible deniability, ’ ” Yazdi explained. “If uncovered, our sleeper would not be able to tell the Americans anything about our operation. We know how to contact them via disposable cell phones, but that is all. They replace the phones after the initial communication. Then they are on their own. We are simply assured of their loyalty to the Ayatollah.”

  “By the Ayatollah?”

  “That, and by their deeds,” Yazdi said. “The only drawback is that once they are unleashed, they are on their own initiative to interfere with operations. Before you remark on the extreme nature of that, it is the only way to secure the services of many younger agents. The Ayatollah’s loyalists are eager to create havoc, not just mischief. They start small, so as not to be discovered, but their acts grow more elaborate if they think there is a chance of doing severe damage to the Great Satan.”

  “I can support that,” Salehi remarked. “How do you reconnect when their work is done? They have thrown away their mobile phones—”

  “They contact us with a new number,” Yazdi said.

  “It sounds like a passage from one of our laws after a compromise has been achieved,” the Expert said.

  “Fortunately, my focus is simpler,” Yazdi went on. He did not have the time to chat as he usually did. “I want to keep the Americans away from us until we can recover the device. It may cost us an asset but it will gain us leverage.”

  Salehi took more tea as he considered this. “This sleeper has been a constant source of information?”

  “Not the highest level of information, but steady. If the individual is found out now—and most likely they will be, for providing disinformation—it will at worst cause some embarrassment and an end to the flow of information.”

  “But we will have more time to recover the weapon.”

  Yazdi nodded.

  “I approve of this. What else will you do?” the imam asked, sensing that his old friend was not quite finished.

  “I’m going to go to Morocco myself,” he said. “There is no one else I trust to do this job as it must be done.”

  The imam reflected for a long moment. “I will support you in this.” He raised his hands, palms out. “May the blessings of God be upon you.”

  Yazdi bowed and left. He was eager to know what his chief of records had found out in his absence.

  Energized in a way he had not been for years, the intelligence minister motioned for his waiting driver.

  CHAPTER 8

  DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA

  When the Jamaran went down, the nearest American naval vessel was the USS California. The Virginia-class submarine of Group Two had been en route to study the radioactive heat bloom when the frigate went down. A mandatory isotachophoresis sweep of the zone revealed a complete absence of aviation fuel. Lt. Jr. Grade Mark Mason had looked at previous satellite images of the Jamaran. The chemical analysis told him that in all likelihood the helicopter he saw in photographs taken just a day before had not been present when the ship went down. Even if the explosion had not destroyed the Toufan, the underwater pressure would have ruptured the gas tank. Some trace of the aircraft-specific fuel would have shown up. There would also be more than just trace radiation, low residual levels from the time the object had been onboard. The findings were clear: neither the helicopter nor whatever Iran had found in the Arctic appeared to be present on the frigate when it sank.

  Mason assumed that the discovery had been placed aboard the helicopter, though without the kind of radiation leakage that was present at its discovery. He charted the range in all directions and found just two potential targets in the flight radius: a scientific research vessel from the University of Tehran—which was probably a listening post eavesdropping on Western Europe—and the container ship Ghorbani. Only the latter had room to accommodate a small helicopter. Mason had a look at satellite surveillance of the local seaways and found the ship—with a tarpaulin stretched across part of the deck. Without requisitioning a closer look, which could take hours, he concluded it was probably the Toufan. If nothing else, the size was just about right.

  Mason sent his findings to Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt. He was pleased to see that his conclusion was confirmed by an independent analysis run over at the CIA. He grinned. The Company’s write-up came in nearly a full minute after he had sent his document to his superior and to liaison desks at the other intelligence organizations. Best of all, according to a tracking flag that appeared on all classified correspondence, it was his report that DNI director General Fletcher Clarke sent to the President of the United States.

  “Let’s hear it for the boys in the bunker,” he chuckled to himself in his cubicle.

  Lt. JG Heyder Namjoo followed Mason’s report with up-to-the-minute photos of the ship at sea with the helicopter still covered on deck.

  Mason skyped over. “How’d you do it?”

  Namjoo grinned. “The X-37B picked up encrypted Tehran-to-ship communication. Auto-video-recorded terminus. I asked for that image.”

  Nice, Mason thought.

  The X-37B was the Air Force space plane that was in a low orbit over the Middle East. One of its functions was to chart all outgoing communications from hostile territory to see where they ended up. It didn’t matter as much what was being said as to whom it was being said. That was one of the ways targets were selected for drone strikes.

  “Destination?” Mason asked.

  “She’s slow-boating home,” Namjoo said.

  “Cargo offloaded?” Mason typed.

  “Possible. Or hiding it in plain sight.”

  “Do we know if they have assets on the ground?”

  “Likely,” Namjoo said. “Question is, would they trust any of them with radioactive materials? A lot of these guys—most of ’em, I’d bet—will turn loyalties on something like that and sell to the highest bidder.”

  He had a point. One of the benefits of dealing with local resources in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya is that national loyalty was a distant second to personal financial gain. They would rather make a profit than prop up a government they didn’t particularly like in a nation they didn’t necessarily even recognize. That wasn’t as true in Iran. He had seen the debriefs of a number of Iranian operatives; they were among the intelligence documents seized in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. These agents were trained by men who had profited under the mercenary days of the Shah and were opposed to the dogmatic interests of the Ayatollah. Many of them agreed to work for Hussein and were sent back to Iran to spy.

  “We can watch the container ship by satellite,” Mason said. “They’re going to need someone in Rabat.”

  “They needed someone in Rabat hours ago,” Namjoo said. “And t
hey need to do more than watch that ship.”

  “What about us? We can get someone over there from our embassy in Rabat—”

  “Our resources there are not only limited, they’re working in the Western Sahara right now,” Namjoo said. “I saw an email not five minutes ago.”

  Namjoo was right. It was time to punt.

  “You want to write it up?” Mason asked.

  “Already half-written.” The other intelligence officer smiled before killing the hookup.

  Mason frowned. Iranian spies weren’t the only ones who looked out for themselves. Even with the unprecedented cooperation between U.S. intelligence agencies, Mason sometimes forgot that high-level jobs were like a game of musical chairs and officers were in competition with one another for seats.

  Hey, it’s national security that matters most, he reminded himself. Though it still stung that his colleague had used the delay to one-up him. Mason went back to work, requesting priority-one surveillance of the Iranian container ship Ghorbani from the National Reconnaissance Office.

  Having already received Namjoo’s analysis, Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt had authorized the request within moments of receiving it.

  QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

  Situated near the Naval Reserve flight line at Andrews Air Force Base, the two-story office building was designated as a ready-room during the Cold War, a staging area for emergency flight crews. It was a drill-and-wait assignment: the teams had nothing to do unless there was a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital. In that case, their job would have been to evacuate key officials to heavily fortified mountainside aeries.

  Today, the ivory-colored building was little more than a relic of the Cold War. Behind the neat lawns and gardens, the once-important beige-colored building was used for storage of files that had not yet been scanned and the handful of personnel whose job was to know what was in those files. Walking into the lobby, Kealey felt as though he were slipping into a horror film populated with zombies. The military and civilian people working here were all quiet, slow, expressionless.

  The chopper pilot had arranged for him to be met by an airman in a golf cart. Kealey and Rayhan were taken to a comfortable office, served coffee and sandwiches, and were told that their “party” was already en route.

  Kealey was surprised when big Fletcher Clarke entered, dressed in his uniform, looking every inch a man waging a campaign.

  When Kealey called from the helicopter to tell him about the portable nature of the nuclear device, Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt had just copied Clarke with the findings of the team at Naval Space Command. Clarke told Kealey he’d brief him when he landed. Kealey hadn’t expected it to be in person.

  The general entered the building with an aide, who remained outside the office while Clarke went in.

  “Afraid of eavesdroppers?” Kealey asked.

  “Way above their security clearance,” Clarke replied.

  Right then, Kealey knew this was larger than even he’d anticipated. Rayhan watched with what struck Kealey as a look of cautious-bordering-on-fearful interest as Clarke sat at a gunmetal desk and opened a laptop.

  “If you’re right about the suitcase bomb—and we believe you are—there are two places it could be,” Clarke said, bringing up an annotated map and getting right to the matter. “One is onboard a container ship that just headed into the Mediterranean. That’s the red line. We’ve got eyes on that from the air and sea right now. Those are the blue lines. The ship’s showing radiation, which means the package was onboard—but not that it still is.”

  He brought up a chart. Rayhan looked at the numbers.

  “If it’s onboard, it’s been resealed,” she said.

  “Not very hot, right?” Clarke asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s a kick in the head,” Clarke said. “The ship’s showing no outward signs of urgency, there are no suspicious communications—it’s doing everything you’d expect from a vessel that doesn’t want to call attention to itself. Naval Space Command believes the target is onboard. But—”

  Clarke let the word hang there. He brought up a police bulletin from Rabat.

  “We grabbed this write-up at our listening post in Melilla, a Spanish territory on the coast of Africa. It was sent by police car uplink to the dispatcher in Salé, Morocco. They were answering an alarm at a medical facility. A dentist’s office was broken into. Initially, they didn’t think anything had been stolen—there was no medicine missing, no money. Then two minutes later they filed a second report after noticing that the X-ray apron was missing.”

  “What was their protocol after that?” Rayhan asked.

  “Nothing to speak of,” Clarke told her. “We contacted our embassy in Rabat, our spooks were in the field, so we woke up Mostpha Bensami, INTERPOL Vice President for Africa, to ask. He said that without what he called ‘triangulated evidence,’ it would not be considered anything more than a routine theft. He said that rebel forces often use X-ray aprons as bulletproof vests.”

  “Not the worst idea I’ve heard,” Kealey said.

  “But that was not the reason it was taken,” Rayhan suggested.

  “We don’t believe so,” Clarke went on. “That’s why I need you two to go over there. If the device is onboard the Iranian ship, we’ll get people onboard to find it. If not—”

  Kealey was smiling and looking at Rayhan. She grinned back.

  “What is it?” Clarke asked.

  “She asked why I had her pack a bag,” Kealey said. “Did you bring a head scarf?”

  “In case there was air-conditioning—but it will do.”

  Clarke made a face. “You’ll have a lot of time to bond over that en route to Naval Station Rota, Spain. They’re holding a Baby Herc supply ship for you. I’ll take you over.”

  “What kind of support are you giving me other than INTERPOL?” Kealey asked.

  “Hell, I can’t even guarantee them completely,” Clarke said. “Apart from Bensami, we don’t know which side of the fence a lot of those boys play. Many of them are Muslims first, Moroccans second—and among those, we don’t know how many are radical.” He looked uncomfortably at Rayhan. “Sorry, Ms. Jafari. That’s just the way their loyalties fall.”

  “I’m an American first and only, sir,” she replied.

  “I know. That’s why I apologized. I didn’t want you to misunderstand.”

  “Can you give me the APHID?” Kealey asked, trying to break this inevitable but uncomfortable talk.

  “I’ve already told Valigorsky to prepare the transition.”

  Rayhan gave Kealey an inquiring look. He ignored it.

  Clarke handed the couple their passports, to which customs stamps from Morocco had been affixed by the DNI’s printing department. That was the end of the meeting. Clarke snapped the laptop shut and left, followed by his aide, Kealey, and Rayhan. They did not speak as they got into the golf cart that was to take them out to the airfield.

  The C-27J Baby Herc was a stubby but sleek, gray two-prop aircraft with an overhead wing structure that didn’t seem sufficient to lift the thick fuselage. It was designed to deliver troops and supplies to airfields that were too short for its big brother, the C-130 Hercules. As such, the interior was constructed to be roomy—not comfortable. Especially not for a flight to Africa.

  In addition to a pair of jeeps and crates of ordnance, the plane was carrying members of Congress who were headed to Egypt. Their scowls told Kealey how happy they were to be held up—though part of that was probably also due to the accommodations. The seats in the Baby Herc were literally red slings hanging from the curved, padded sides of the aircraft. Kealey selected a pair that hung between the two jeeps so they wouldn’t have to look at their travel companions. He helped Rayhan into her harness, which had loops for the arms—though no one used them unless there was turbulence. There were no windows here, not that it would have mattered since the slings faced in.

  “Is this functional or comfortable?” Rayhan asked as she wriggled from side to side,
then forward and back as if the seat were a swing.

  “Definitely the former, very nominally the latter,” he said. “I think I’m gonna like these better than the C-130s, which had seats, if you can call them that.”

  “Seats were worse?”

  “They rattled. Constantly. You didn’t want to sit for a week after riding in one of those. Many of us couldn’t sit for a week.”

  “Rattling I can handle,” she said. “I ride ATVs on the weekend. Hours at a time.”

  “Oh? I wouldn’t have guessed you were an off-roader.”

  “Why? Too petite?”

  “No,” he said. “Too sane.”

  She smiled. “I took it up because of a former boyfriend. I think he broke up with me because I was better at it.”

  “Better or took more chances?”

  “Actually, both. I liked playing chicken with him.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got some measure of control there,” Kealey said. “These things—they’re like riding barrels over a waterfall . . . for hours. You got used to it in the air but when you land—that’s when the delayed reaction sets in. It’s like trying to walk after you’ve been running on a vibrating bed.”

  “Something you’ve tried?”

  “I only use metaphors when personal experience is attached,” Kealey told her as the hatch was closed. “It’s kind of a funny story. I turned one of those beds on in a motel in Istanbul. It had been a long day of staking out a Turk who was trying to sell arms to Syrian rebels. I wanted to help him, but he didn’t know that, so he hired someone to kill me. I figured they’d figure no one would pay to turn the bed on unless they were in it. I was watching from the closet. I pinned the guy easy enough but then spent the next fifteen, twenty minutes shaking all around as I interrogated him.”

  “That’s a funny story?”

  “It is, when I think back on it. Wasn’t, then. He put a nine-inch blade in the blanket and the knife was wobbling back and forth like some kind of baby toy.”

  Rayhan was looking at Kealey—at his little smile, not his eyes. “You really enjoy this work—despite how it has treated you.”