Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  “How many dead?”

  “Six to eight of ours. None of theirs.”

  “Praise God for that.” With no hostages killed, the Western press would quickly forget about the incident, and often where the press’s attention went, so, too, did intelligence agencies’. Such was the burden of fighting their “global war on terror.” They were the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

  “Do we know who he recruited?”

  “We’re looking into it. Also, we don’t know whether anyone survived the raid-except for al-Kariim himself,” Tariq added. “He didn’t participate, in fact.”

  “Imbecile! So this… nothing plans a mission without our approval, then botches it and doesn’t have the good sense or honor of dying in the attempt… Do we know where he is now?”

  “No, but he shouldn’t be hard to find. Especially if we extend our hand. He’ll be on the run, looking for safe haven.”

  The Emir nodded thoughtfully. “Good. Do that. Offer him an olive branch, but at a distance. Have Almasi handle it.”

  “And when we have him?”

  “Make him an example for the others.”

  34

  IN PARIS’S Montparnasse Arrondissement Shasif Hadi sat, sipping his coffee and doing his best not to appear nervous.

  As promised, his connection at Topanga Beach had made contact the day after their meeting and given him instructions where he should pick up the return packages, each of which he’d found at rented mailboxes in the Los Angeles area. He was unsurprised to find each package contained an unlabeled CD-ROM but was surprised to find a typewritten note attached to one of them-“Indiana Café, Montparnasse, 77 Av Maine”-along with a date and time. What Hadi didn’t know was whether this was simply another courier mission or something more.

  Algerian by birth, Hadi had emigrated to France in his early teens as his father sought gainful employment. Hadi spoke good French, with the accent of a pied-noir, a “black foot,” the name applied two hundred years before to French colonial citizens of what had been the French colony on the North Coast of Africa, erased in the early 1960s after a bloody and prolonged colonial/ civil war that the French Republic had more left than lost. But Algeria had not exactly flourished, and so the Arabs had exported millions of its citizens to Europe, where they had been marginally welcomed, all the more so in the last decade of the twentieth century, when they’d discovered their Islamic identity in a country that still held to the idea of the melting pot. Speak the language (pronounce the words properly), adopt the customs, and you were French, and the French race didn’t particularly care what color your skin might be. Though nominally a Catholic country, the French didn’t care what church you might attend, since they were not a nation of churchgoers, either. But Islam had changed that. Perhaps remembering the victory of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, they knew that they’d fought wars with Muslims, but mostly they objected to the fact that Muslim immigrants rejected their culture, adopting modes of dress and customs that did not fit in with the wine-drinking bons vivants, and thus leaped out of the melting pot. And why would any man or woman not wish to be French? they asked themselves. And so the myriad French police agencies kept an eye on such people. Hadi knew this, and therefore made an effort to fit in, in the hope that Allah would understand and forgive him out of His infinite mercy. And besides, he was hardly the only Muslim who imbibed alcohol. The French police took note of this and consequently ignored him. He had a job, as a salesclerk in a video store, got along well with his workmates, lived in a modest but comfortable flat on rue Dolomieu in the 5th Arrondissement (“district” in Paris), drove a Citroën sedan, and made no trouble for anyone. They did not notice that he lived somewhat in excess of his means. The cops here were good but not perfect.

  Nor did they notice that he traveled a little, mostly within Europe, and occasionally met people from out of the country, usually at a comfortable bistro. Hadi particularly enjoyed a light red from the Loire Valley, not knowing that the vintner was a Jew who was a vigorous supporter of the State of Israel. Anti-Semitism was regrettably alive in France once again, rather to the pleasure of the five million Muslims who now lived there.

  “Mind if I join you?” a voice said near Hadi’s shoulder.

  Hadi turned. “Be my guest.”

  Ibrahim sat down. “How was your trip?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “So what do you bring me?” Ibrahim asked.

  Hadi reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the CD-ROM disks, which he passed over without attempting to hide the transfer. Trying to appear inconspicuous was often conspicuous in and of itself. Besides, if the casual stranger-or even a seasoned customs official, for that matter-were to see the contents of either CD, they’d find themselves looking at a digital slideshow of someone’s summer vacation.

  “Did you look at these?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Any problems with customs?”

  “No. I was surprised, actually,” said Hadi.

  “There are five million of us here. They cannot watch us all, and I keep a low profile. They think that a Muslim who drinks alcohol is not a danger to them.”

  Keeping a low profile meant that he never attended a mosque and didn’t frequent places used by Islamic fundamentalists, called “Integrists” by the French because “fundamentalist” was a term locally applied to Christian religious fanatics, who were probably too busy getting drunk to be a threat to him, Hadi thought. Infidels.

  “They mentioned a possibility of my role changing,” Hadi prompted.

  They were at a sidewalk table. There were people within three meters, but there was traffic noise, and the usual bustle of a big-city environment. Both men knew not to hunch over the table in a conspiratorial manner. That had gone out with 1930s movies. Much better to drink wine anonymously, smoke, and turn heads to look at the women passing by in their chic dresses and bare legs. The French could understand that readily enough.

  “If you’re interested,” Ibrahim replied.

  “I am.”

  “It will be different than what you’re used to. There is some risk.”

  “If God wills it.”

  Ibrahim looked hard at him for five seconds, then nodded. “Your trip to Brazil… How many times have you been there?”

  “Seven in the last four months.”

  “You enjoyed yourself?”

  “It was nice enough, I suppose.”

  “Nice enough to return if you are asked?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We have a man there. I’d like you to meet with him and arrange accommodations.”

  Hadi nodded. “When do I leave?”

  Got him,” Jack said, handing the pages over.

  Bell took them and leaned back in his swivel chair. “France?” he asked. “The birth announcement?”

  Exploring his suspicions about the URC’s sudden communication protocol change, Jack had backtracked and cross-referenced until he managed to strip away one of the alphanumeric handles, revealing a new name on the e-mail distribution list.

  “Yep. His name is Shasif Hadi. Apparently lives in Rome, not sure where exactly, but he’s a Muslim, probably Algerian in origin, and probably doing his best to stay under the radar. Been spending a lot of time in Paris.”

  Bell chuckled. “Probably the Italians have no idea he exists.”

  “How good are they?” Jack asked.

  “The Italians? Their intelligence services are first-rate, and historically they don’t mind doing some heavy lifting. Their police are pretty good, too. They don’t have as many restrictions on them as our guys do. They are better at tracking people and investigating background stuff than we allow our people to be. They can do wiretaps administratively, without a court order, like our guys have to do it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attract their attention if I were breaking the law. It’s the old European way, they like to know as much about people and what they do as possible. If your nose i
s clean, they’ll leave you alone. If not, they can make your life pretty miserable. Their legal system is not like ours, but on the whole it’s pretty fair.”

  “They keep an eye on their Muslim population because there’ve been some rumbles, but not much more than that. You’re right, though: If this fellow’s a player, he’ll know to keep his head down, drink his wine, eat his bread, and watch TV like everybody else. They’ve had terrorism problems, but not too bad. If you go back to the OAS in the 1960s, yeah, that was a real problem once, and a scary one, but they handled it pretty efficiently. Pretty ruthlessly, too. The Italians know how to do business when they have to. So this Hadi-is he static?”

  “No, been traveling a lot in the last six months or so-here, Western Europe, South America…”

  “Where specifically?”

  “Caracas, Paris, Dubai…”

  “Aside from that and the e-mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”

  “That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop-or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.

  “If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills-plus our technology against us.”

  “So: recommendations?”

  “We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do it for us, can we?”

  And with that question, Jack had identified the real problem at The Campus. Since it didn’t exist, it couldn’t broadcast its hits to the official intelligence community and thereby follow things up via conventional channels. Even if they discovered oil in Kansas and got people rich, some bureaucrat or other would backtrack the notice just to find out who’d done it, and thus blow The Campus’s cover. Being supersecret could be as much a handicap as an advantage. Or even more. They could transmit a query to Fort Meade disguised as an Agency question, but even that was dangerous, and had to be approved by Gerry Hendley himself. Well, you took the bitter with the sweet. In a world where two or more heads were in fact better than one at problem solving, The Campus was alone.

  “I’m afraid not, Jack,” Bell replied. “Well, unless this Hadi’s on someone’s list by accident or the e-mail itself is innocuous, I’d say we’re looking at a courier.”

  While not the fastest means of communication, couriers were the most secure. Encrypted data and messages, easily hidden in a document or on a CD-ROM, aren’t something airport security folks were trained to ferret out. Unless you had a courier’s identity-which they might now have-the bad guys could be planning the end of the world and the good guys would never know it.

  “Agreed,” Jack said. “Unless he’s working for National Geographic, there’s something there. He’s operational or he’s playing support.”

  The kid thought operationally, and that, too, was not a bad characteristic, Rick Bell thought to himself. “Okay,” Bell told Jack. “Put it at the top of your list and keep me up to speed.”

  “Right,” Jack said, then stood up. He turned for the door, then turned back.

  “Something on your mind?” Bell asked.

  “Yeah. I want to have a sit-down with the boss.”

  “What about?”

  Jack told him. Bell tried to keep the surprise off his face. He steepled his fingers and looked at Jack. “Where’s this coming from? The MoHa thing? Because that ain’t real life, Jack. Fieldwork is-”

  “I know, I know. I just want to feel like I’m doing something.”

  “You are.”

  “You know what I mean, Rick. Doing something. I’ve given it a lot of thought. At least let me put it on the table in front of Gerry.”

  Bell considered this, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll set it up.”

  Nine thousand fucking miles and still no beer, Sam Driscoll thought, but only for a moment as he reminded himself yet again he could have just as easily made the hop home in a rubber bag. A couple of inches either way, the docs had said, and the splinter would’ve shredded either his brachial, cephalic, or basilic vein, and he might have bled out long before reaching the Chinook. Lost two along the way, though. Barnes and Gomez had taken the full brunt of the RPG. Young and Peterson had caught some minor leg shrapnel but had managed to climb aboard the Chinook on their own. From there it had been a short hop to FOB Kala Gush, where he parted company with the team, save Captain Wilson and his shattered leg, who accompanied him first to Ramstein Air Base, then on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. As it turned out, both needed the kind of orthopedic surgery in which Brooke specialized. And Demerol. The nurses here were real good with the pain meds, which had gone a long way to helping him forget that five days earlier he’d had a hunk of Hindu Kush granite sticking out of his shoulder.

  The mission had been a bust, at least in terms of their main objective, and Rangers weren’t in the business of failing, their fault or not. Providing the intel had been right and their target had ever been in the cave at all, he’d slipped away, probably less than a day before they’d arrived. Still, Driscoll reminded himself, given the shit storm they came through on the way back to the LZ, it could have been a lot worse. He’d lost two but had come back with thirteen. Barnes and Gomez. Goddamn it.

  The door opened, and in rolled Captain Wilson in a wheelchair. “Got a minute for a visitor?”

  “You bet. How’s the leg?”

  “Still broken.”

  Driscoll chuckled at that. “Gonna be that way for a while, sir.”

  “No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”

  “Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”

  “Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”

  “Young and Peterson?”

  “Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”

  “Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”

  “’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”

  “Both of us?”

  Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know
about, Sam?”

  “No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”

  “All kosher in the cave?”

  “Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”

  “Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”

  It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.

  “And how many sentries did you encounter?”

  “Two.”

  “Both killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.

  “After we policed everything up, we counted-”

  “No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”

  “Define ‘armed.’”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”

  “It’s in my report.”

  “Three, correct?”

  “That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.

  “The rest were asleep.”

  “With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”

  “You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”

  Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”

  “You shot them in their sleep.”

  Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

  “Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants. Add to that the statements of the rest of your team-”