“You see this business about the Koran they found?” Cummings asked the group. “No way that belonged to anybody in that cave.”
No one responded; there was no need. She was right, of course, but barring an inscription and a “return to” address on the front cover, an antique Koran wasn’t going to do them much good.
“They got plenty of pictures, I see,” Mary Pat said. The Rangers had meticulously photographed all the URC faces in the cave. If any of them had been nabbed or tagged in the past, the computer would spit out the details. “And samples of the table. Smart guy, this Driscoll. Where are the samples, Ben?”
“Somehow they missed the helo out of Centcom Kabul. They’ll be here in the morning.”
Mary Pat wondered what, if anything, the samples would tell them. Langley’s Science and Tech wizards were miracle workers, as were the FBI labs at Quantico, but there was no telling how long that thing had been in the cave, nor was there any guarantee the mock-up would hold any peculiar traits. Crapshoot.
“Pictures we got now,” Margolin said.
He picked up a remote control from the table and pointed it at the forty-two-inch flat screen on the wall. A moment later an 8×10 grid of thumbnail images appeared on the monitor. Each was annotated by a date and a time stamp. Margolin clicked the remote and enlarged the first photo, which showed the sand table in situ from a distance of about four feet.
Whoever had actually taken the shots had done a thorough job, Mary Pat saw, photographing the sand table from the macro to the micro, using a miniature measuring tape for scale in each shot. Despite it being a cave, they’d taken care with the lighting, too, which made a big difference. Of the 215 shots Driscoll and his team had taken, 190 were variations on a theme-same view but close up or at a different angle-and Mary Pat wondered if there was enough for Langley to create a 3-D rendering of the thing. Something to pursue. Whether animating the damn thing would make any difference she had no idea, but better to try it and fail than later regret not trying. Somebody in the URC had gone to a lot of trouble to make this thing, and it’d be nice to know why. You don’t make a goddamned sand table on a whim.
According to the report, the remaining twenty-five pictures were repeats of three separate spots on the sand table, two on the front and one on the back, all displaying some kind of marking. Mary Pat asked Margolin to call these up on the monitor, which he did, setting it for slideshow. When it was done, Mary Pat said, “The two on the front look like manufacturer’s marks. Driscoll said the base was heavy-duty plywood. Might be able to use the marks to track something down. The other mark, on the back… Tell me if I’m wrong, but that looks handwritten.”
“Agreed,” Margolin said. “We’ll turn the translators loose.”
“And what about the million-dollar question?” Cummings said. “Why make the sand table, and where’s it supposed to represent?”
“The Emir’s vacation spot, I hope,” Turnbull said.
They all laughed.
“If wishes were horses…” Margolin mused. “Mary Pat, I can see the gears cranking in your head. Got an idea?”
“Maybe; lemme get back to you.”
“How about the documents in the ammo box?” Turnbull asked.
“Translators estimate tomorrow afternoon,” Margolin said. He opened the accordion file, withdrew the map from the cave, and unfolded it on the table. Everyone stood up and leaned over it.
Cummings read the legend: “Defense Mapping Agency… 1982?”
“Left behind by the CIA advisers,” Mary Pat said. “They wanted the mujahideen to have maps, just not the best maps.”
Margolin turned the map over, displaying the Baedeker’s Peshawar side.
“Got some markings here,” Mary Pat said, tapping the paper and leaning closer. “Dots. Ballpoint pen.” They scoured the map and in short order found nine marks, each a cluster of either three or four dots.
“Who’s got a knife?” Mary Pat asked. Turnbull handed her a pocketknife, and she slit the masking tape along all four edges, then turned the Baedeker’s over. “There you are…” she murmured.
Inscribed in the upper-right-hand corner, no larger than a quarter-inch, was an upward-pointing arrow followed by three dots, and a downward-pointing arrow followed by four dots.
“Legend,” Margolin whispered.
23
IT STARTED in the Department of Justice. Forwarded by the Pentagon, it was First Sergeant Driscoll’s written report of his takedown in the Hindu Kush cave. The report-only three pages long, and simply written-detailed what Driscoll and his men had done. What flagged it for the attorney who reviewed the report was the body count. Driscoll reported having killed nine or so Afghan fighters, four of them with a silenced pistol at zero range. Direct shots to the head, the attorney saw, which made his blood run a little cold. It was the nearest thing he’d ever read to a confession of cold-blooded murder. He’d read his share of such confessions but never written so directly. This Driscoll fellow had violated some rules or laws or something, the attorney thought. It wasn’t a battlefield action, not even a sniper’s account of killing people at a hundred yards or so as they stuck their heads up like ducks at a shooting gallery. He’d taken care of the “bad guys” (so he called them) while they slept. Slept. Totally harmless, the lawyer thought, and he’d killed them without as much as a thought and reported it straightforwardly, like an account of cutting the grass in his front yard.
This was outrageous. He’d had “the drop” on them, as they said in Western movies. They’d been unable to resist. Hadn’t even known their lives were in danger, but this Driscoll guy had taken out his pistol and dispatched them like a kid stomping on insects. But they hadn’t been insects. They’d been human beings, and under international law, they’d been entitled to capture and to be transformed into prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Protocols. But Driscoll had killed them, totally without mercy. Worse still, the knuckle-dragger seemed to have given little thought to whether the men he’d killed could have been milked for information. He’d decided, quite arbitrarily, it seemed, that the nine men were worthless, both as human beings and as sources.
The lawyer was young, not yet thirty years of age. He’d graduated Yale at the top of his class before taking an offer to work in Washington. He’d almost clerked for a Supreme Court justice, but had been knocked out of that slot by a hick from the University of Michigan. He wouldn’t have liked it anyway, he was sure. The new Supreme Court, in place for five or so years now, was full of conservative “strict constructionists” who worshipped the letter of the law as if it were Zeus of ancient times. Like Southern Baptists in their country pulpits or on TV on Sunday mornings, which he saw only in glimpses while surfing the channels for the morning talk shows.
Damn.
He reread the report and was again shocked at the bare facts of the third-grade language. A United States Army soldier had killed without mercy, and without regard to international law. Then he wrote a report on the event, outlining the process in stark terms.
The report had come to his desk from a friend and classmate working in the office of the Secretary of Defense, with a cover note saying that nobody in the Pentagon had taken much note of it, but that he, the other attorney, had found it outrageous. The new SecDef had been captured by the bloated bureaucracy on the other side of the river. A lawyer himself, he’d spent too much time with those creatures in uniform. He hadn’t been alarmed by this bloody report, and that despite the fact that the sitting President had issued directives on the use of force, even on the battlefield.
Well, he’d see about this, the attorney thought. He wrote up his own summary of the case, with a blistering cover note that would go to his section chief, a Harvard graduate who had the President’s ear-well, he might; his father was one of the President’s foremost political supporters.
This First Sergeant Driscoll was a murderer, the attorney thought. Oh, in a court of law the judge might take pity on him, noting that he was a soldie
r on what was a battlefield, sort of. It wasn’t really a war, the attorney knew, since Congress had not declared war, but it was commonly assumed to be so, and the attorney for Driscoll would point that out, and the Federal District Court judge-who would have been selected by the defense for his equanimity to soldiers-would take pity on the killer for that reason. It was a standard defense tactic, but even so, this killer would be slapped down rather hard. Even if acquitted (which was likely, given the composition of the jury that the attorney for the defense would work hard to select, not a difficult task in North Carolina), he’d learn a lesson, and the lesson would be learned by a lot of other soldiers who’d much rather shoot guns on a hillside than sit in a law court.
What the hell; it would send a message, and it was a message that needed to be sent. Of the many things that distinguished the United States from Banana Republics was the military’s unwavering obedience to its civilian leadership. Without that, America was no better than Cuba or frickin’ Uganda under Idi Amin. The scope of Driscoll’s crime, while admittedly small, was beside the point. These people needed to be reminded who they answered to.
The attorney drafted his endorsement to the document and e-mailed it to his section chief with a return-receipt feature allowed on the in-house computer network. This Driscoll guy needed to be slapped down, and he was the man to do it. The young attorney was sure of that. Okay, fine, they’d been after the Emir, but they hadn’t got him, and there was a price for failure in the real world.
After a five-hour journey by car, he boarded a plane in Caracas for the flight to Dallas and points beyond. Shasif Hadi’s carry-on bag held a laptop that had been duly checked at the gate to make sure it was real. Also checked were the nine CD-ROMs in the bag with various games for him to play on the hop across the ocean. Except for one. Even if that one had been examined, it would have been shown to contain gibberish, robustly encrypted data written in C++ computer code that made no sense at all, but unless the TSA had programmers or hackers on staff at the checkpoints, there would be no way of distinguishing it from a regular computer game. He’d been told nothing of the contents and had merely been given a meeting place in Los Angeles to hand it over to someone he would know only by the exchange of carefully scripted recognition phrases.
Once that was done, for appearances’ sake he’d spend a few days in California, then fly to Toronto, and from there back to his semipermanent home base to await another assignment. He was the perfect courier. He knew nothing of genuine value and could therefore betray nothing of value.
He desperately wanted to be more directly involved with the cause, and he’d made this desire known to his Paris contact. He’d been loyal; he was capable and ready to lay down his life if asked. Admittedly, he’d had only rudimentary military training, but there had to be more to this war than pulling a trigger, didn’t there? Hadi felt a pang of guilt. If Allah, in all his wisdom, saw fit to ask more of him, then he would gladly oblige. Similarly, if his destiny was to play only this small role, he should accept that as well. Whatever Allah’s wish, he would obey.
He proceeded through the checkpoint with little trouble beyond the supplemental search most Arab-looking men got nowadays, then made his way to the gate. Twenty minutes later he was aboard the aircraft and belted in.
His total time in transit would be only twelve hours, and that included his automobile ride to his airport of origin. And so he sat in the aft-most first-class seat on the right side of the airbus airliner, playing his mindless shoot-’em-up game and thinking about a movie on the mini-screen provided for free with the cost of the ticket. But he was close to a personal record on the game, and he passed on the movie for the moment. He found that a glass of wine helped his score. Must have relaxed him just enough to steady his hands on the laptop’s trackpad…
24
CHIEF OF STAFF Wesley McMullen hurried down the hall, got the nod from the secretary, then pushed through the door and into the Oval Office. He was late, not quite by a minute, but the President was a stickler for timeliness. The group had already assembled, with Kealty in the wingback chair at the head of the coffee table and Ann Reynolds and Scott Kilborn seated on the couches on either side. McMullen took the chair opposite the President.
“Car wouldn’t start this morning, Wes?” Kealty joked. The smile seemed genuine enough, but McMullen knew his boss well enough to recognize the warning.
“My apologies, Mr. President.” As he was every day except Sunday, McMullen had been in the office since five a.m. Sundays he worked a half day, from nine until three. Such was life in the Kealty administration and the rarefied atmosphere of the executive branch.
It was a Tuesday, the day of Kealty’s biweekly meeting with Director of Central Intelligence Scott Kilborn. Unlike the previous President, Kealty wasn’t hands-on when it came to intelligence, trusting Kilborn to keep him up to speed.
Kilborn, a supporter of Kealty’s since the President’s days in the Senate, had left his post as chairman of the political sciences department at Harvard to serve as Kealty’s foreign affairs adviser before being nominated for the slot at Langley. Kilborn was competent enough, McMullen knew, but the DCI was overcompensating for the previous administration’s foreign policy platform, which both he and Kealty had proclaimed wrong-headed and counterproductive. McMullen agreed, at least marginally, but Kilborn had swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, pulling back from some of the CIA’s overseas operational initiatives that had finally started bearing fruit, something that McMullen knew had infuriated the Clandestine Service. Case officers who had been living overseas, away from their families, for six to eight months at a time and risking their lives where a white face was as good as a bull’s-eye had recently been told, “Thanks for all your hard work, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction.” The rumor was that in the next few months Langley was going to be seeing an exodus of retirement-and near-retirement-age case officers putting in their papers. If so, it would set the Clandestine Service back nearly a decade.
Worse still, with Kealty’s tacit approval, Kilborn often sidestepped into the state department’s turf and poached issues that lay in that arguably gray area between diplomacy and intelligence.
As for Ann Reynolds, Kealty’s National Security Adviser, she, too, was smart enough but painfully inexperienced. Plucked by Kealty from the House of Representatives during her first term, Reynolds had little background in security matters, save a junior membership on the House Intelligence Committee. She was, Kealty had told McMullen at the time of the decision, a “demographic necessity.” He had badly mauled his challenger for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Governor Claire Raines, winning the party nod but losing a good chunk of his female base in the process. If he had any hopes of a second term, he had to win it back.
Reynolds was well spoken and had a good academic mind, of that there was no question, but after nearly a year on the job, she was still far, far down the wrong side of the learning curve and realizing, McMullen suspected, that the real world and the world of textbooks had little in common.
And what about you, Wes, old buddy? he thought. A black man, under thirty, a Yale-graduated lawyer with half a dozen years of quasigovernmental think-tank service under his belt. He had no doubt the media and gossip mavens said the same thing about him: He was an affirmative-action choice and in way over his head, which was partially true, at least the last part. He was in over his head but learning to swim quickly. The problem was, the better his backstroke got, the dirtier the pool seemed. Kealty was a decent enough man, but he was too concerned with the big picture-about his “vision” for the country and its place in the world-and less focused on the “how” of making it happen. Worse still, he was so worried about reversing the course his predecessor had set that he, too, like Kilborn, often sent the pendulum swinging dangerously in the other direction, too lenient in his stand against enemies and too forgiving of allies who failed to follow through on their commitments. The economy was warming again,
though, and with it the President’s approval ratings were rising, and Kealty took this as a blanket indicator that God was in his heaven and all was well with the world at large.
And why are you staying, he asked himself for the umpteenth time, now that you’ve seen the emperor’s new clothes? He didn’t have a ready answer to the question, which worried him.
“Okay, Scott, what’s happening in the world today?” Kealty said, starting the meeting.
“Iraq,” Kilborn began. “Centcom has submitted a final drawdown plan for our forces. Thirty percent over the first one hundred twenty days, then ten percent each sixty-day period to follow until we reach nominal force status.”
Kealty nodded thoughtfully. “And the Iraqi Security Forces?” The training and outfitting of the new Iraqi Army had progressed in fits and starts over the past eight months, leading to a debate in Congress about when, if ever, the ISF would be ready to take over completely. The problem wasn’t skill but rather unit cohesion. For the most part the ISF soldiers absorbed the training well enough, but like most Arab nations, Iraq was little better than a collection of sects and extended families, both secular and religious alike. The concept of nationalism came in a distant second to tribe loyalty or Shia/Sunni affiliation. For a time Centcom had toyed with the idea of organizing units and commands based on such familial and religious alignments, but the plan was quickly abandoned as the analysts realized the United States would be doing nothing more than creating well-armed gangs who were already predisposed to internecine warfare. The question was: Could rival clan or sect members stand side by side and fight for the larger good of their country?
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