Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  “Or GRU,” Rounds added. “Military intelligence.”

  “Right.”

  “Any way to narrow down the list, Mary Pat?” Clark asked.

  “Maybe. It’s a pretty specialized skill. Probably would take somebody who handled illegals. Lot of those still around, though.”

  “How many of them are dead, though?” Jack said. “In Saint Petersburg. And in the last four months. They probably would’ve killed Masood a lot earlier if he hadn’t gone to ground. He was a loose end. The Russian mover would be, too.”

  “Good thinking, Jack,” Hendley said. “Think you can work with that?” he asked Mary Pat.

  “Give me a few hours.”

  She was back from the NCTC in two. “Wasn’t all that hard, really. Jack, you nailed it. Last month in Saint Petersburg, Yuriy Beketov, former KGB officer, Directorate S-Illegals-of the First Chief Directorate. Shot dead in a Chechnyan restaurant. The Saint Petersburg cops put it on the Interpol wire. I’ve got a couple people trying to tease out some more details, but Beketov seems to fit.”

  “Until then, let’s play with it,” Hendley said. “Say he goes to Switzerland, or Sweden or Finland, for surgery.”

  “Sweden gets my vote, too,” Rounds said. “He’d want something high-end, very private, with select clientele. A lot more of those in Sweden than Finland. It’s a place to start.”

  “Google,” Jack said.

  It was nearly nine at night when they found what they needed. Jack pushed back from his laptop and ran his hands through his hair. “Well, I’ll give them this. They’re consistent. Ruthless and consistent.”

  “Enlighten us,” Clark said.

  “Three weeks ago, the Orrhogen Clinic in Sundsvall. Burned to the ground with the managing director inside. Something else: Sundsvall is only about seventy-five miles north of Söderhamn. If Brian and Dominic hadn’t shown up, it’s a safe bet Rolf the mechanic would be dead right now.”

  “Okay, so the Emir has the surgery, spends a few days recuperating, then leaves,” Granger said. “Chances are halfway good he hasn’t got a passport. He’d need a private charter, a private airport, and a pilot who doesn’t mind getting a little dirty.” Hendley considered this. “How exactly would he do it?”

  “Rolf gave us the answer,” Dominic replied. “Duplicate transponder code.”

  “Right,” Jack replied. “Hlasek switches off the first transponder code, drops off the radar, turns on the second transponder code, and they’ve got themselves a new plane.”

  “That kind of thing would certainly get written down somewhere,” Rounds observed. “Do we have an in with the FAA or Transport Canada?”

  “No,” Granger replied. “Doesn’t mean we can’t, though.” He picked up the phone, and two minutes later Gavin was in the conference room.

  Jack explained what they were looking for. “Doable?”

  Gavin snorted. “The FAA’s firewalls are a joke. Transport Canada’s not any better. Give me a half-hour.”

  Good as his word, thirty minutes later Biery called up to the conference room. Hendley put him on speakerphone. “In the time frame you gave me, eighteen flights dropped off radar in either U.S. or Canadian airspace. Sixteen were nothing-operator error-one was a Cessna that crashed outside Albany, and one, a Dassault Falcon 9000, that dropped off altogether. The pilot reported a problem with its landing gear on its way into Moose Jaw. A couple minutes later they lost it on radar.”

  “Where’s Moose Jaw?” Dominic asked.

  “Canada. Due north, about where North and South Dakota meet,” Jack said.

  “There’s something else,” Biery said. “I did a little cross-hacking keyword search between Transport Canada, the FAA, and the NTSB. Three days after Moose Jaw lost the Falcon, a fisherman off the coast of California found an FDR-flight data recorder. According to the NTSB, the box belonged to a Gulfstream-the one that’s supposedly still sitting in a hangar outside Söderhamn. Problem is, Dassault planes are equipped with prototype FDR. It’s designed to break free of the airframe when it detects a certain kinetic threshold. And it’s got a float and a beacon-Gulfstream boxes only have a beacon. The box they found belonged to Hlasek’s Falcon.”

  Hendley let out a breath and looked around the table. “He’s here. The sonofabitch is hiding right under our noses.”

  Clark nodded. “The question is, what? It would have to be something big to bring him out.”

  52

  OUR FRIEND ARRIVED SAFELY?” Ibrahim asked.

  Digital clicks occasionally interrupted his subordinate’s voice.

  “Yes,” the Emir replied. “He left again yesterday. I’ve read the details of your plan. Tell me where things stand.”

  “We’re ready. Simply give the word and we can be in country within seventy-two hours.”

  Talking directly to the commander of his ground team had been an impromptu decision on his part, and certainly dangerous, especially given his own precarious circumstances, but the risk was warranted. The communication method was as secure as any, a homemade encryption package they had married to the house’s VoIP-Voice over Internet Protocol-computer-to-computer Skype account.

  Having decided to proceed with Ibrahim’s operation, the Emir wanted a final discussion, as a measure of reassurance not only for himself but also for Ibrahim. If he should lose his life on the mission his true reward would come in paradise, but here on earth he was still a soldier going into battle, and soldiers often needed praise and encouragement.

  “How many times have you been there?” the Emir asked.

  “Four times. Twice for recruitment and twice for reconnaissance.”

  “Tell me more about your contact.”

  “His name is Cassiano Silva. Brazilian by birth, raised in the Catholic faith. He converted to Islam six years ago. He is one of the faithful, of that I’m sure, and he’s never failed to provide what I’ve asked of him.”

  “Tariq tells me your recruitment of him was nicely done.”

  “Western intelligence calls it a ‘false flag.’ He believes I’m with Kuwait’s intelligence service, with connections to OPEC’s Market Analysis Division. I thought he would find the idea of industrial espionage more… palatable.”

  “I’m impressed, Ibrahim,” the Emir said, meaning it. “You’ve shown good instincts.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And your plan… you’re confident it is feasible?”

  “I am, but I’d like to remain cautious until I am on the ground. On the surface, all the parts fit together nicely.”

  So he’d let Ibrahim go forward with his plan and know it would be the first domino in a series, at the end of which awaited a truly world-changing event. But that was in the future-not far in the future but far enough that focusing on it to the exclusion of the smaller pieces could harm the whole.

  “How many casualties do you expect?” the Emir asked.

  “That is impossible to say at this time. Hundreds, perhaps. As you said, though, those numbers are largely irrelevant.”

  “True, but dead bodies on television have a fearsome effect, which is something that will work to our benefit later. How long will your final reconnaissance take?”

  “Five to six days.”

  “And after that?”

  “Forty-eight to seventy-two hours to the event itself.”

  The Emir brought his mental calendar to the forefront of his mind. Juggling more than one operation as he was, he would have to hold off on final approval until they heard back from the Russian teams at least. The other pieces in Dubai and Dakar were in place and standing by. The cornerstone, of course, their lovely Tatar girl, could be hurried only so much. Tariq was confident she was moving at an appropriate pace, and that would have to do for now, but in the back of his mind he had to consider alternatives should she fail. Still, they had to be ready to step in. A dangerous gambit, that. They might be able to disguise their actions or put in place some delaying tactics, but violence-especially the kind of violence that wo
uld likely be required-would without a doubt draw the attention of the authorities.

  If such action became necessary, could they stay far enough ahead of the authorities to complete Lotus?

  “You have final approval,” the Emir said.

  Their hunch that the Emir was in all likelihood already in the United States, hiding somewhere between the Dakotas and California, was quickly followed by the realization that there was little they could do to confirm the hypothesis. True, they knew Shasif Hadi, flying under the alias Joel Klein, had been headed for Las Vegas when they lost his trail, but that meant nothing. The Klein passport hadn’t subsequently shown up in the system, which could mean he went no farther than Las Vegas, or it could mean he’d simply followed the rules of tradecraft and dumped Klein for yet another alias. Jack’s peel-back of Hadi’s activities had shown a lot of travel to the Persian Gulf states, Western Europe, and South America-which would necessitate a number of CONUS layovers. Short of distributing Hadi’s photo to Las Vegas law enforcement, there was little they could do but continue to work the problem with what they had in hand.

  Whoa!” Jack Ryan Jr. said from his cubicle.

  “What?” Dominic called from the conference room, where the daily skull session had just started.

  “Hang on, I’m coming in.” He tapped a few keys, sending the file to the conference room’s AV node, then walked in and picked up the remote from the table.

  “You look like a teenager who’s seen his first boob,” Brian said. “What’s up?”

  “I was trolling one of the URC websites when I came across this.” He aimed the remote at the forty-two-inch monitor on the wall. After a few seconds, three side-by-side images appeared on the flat screen, the first showing a man hanging from the neck in a featureless room; the second showing the same man lying on the floor, his severed head sitting beside him; in the third, the man’s severed head was bracketed by his severed feet.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s some serious shit,” Brian said.

  “Which website, Jack?” Rounds asked.

  He recited the URL, then said, “It’s a URC hub, but up until now it’s been all propaganda-‘rah-rah, stick it to the infidel, we’ve got them on the run’ kind of stuff.”

  “Well, this sure as hell ain’t a pep talk,” Ding Chavez said.

  “It’s punishment,” Clark said, staring at the screen.

  “What’re you thinking?”

  “Hanging is a pretty standard execution technique for them, and the beheading is a little extra humiliation-something out of the Koran, as I recall-but the feet… That’s the real message?”

  “What, he tried to run?” Dominic asked. “Leave the URC?”

  “No, he made a move and the higher-ups weren’t happy about it. Saw this in Lebanon in ’82. Some offshoot of Hamas, I can’t remember the name, blew up a bus in Haifa. A week later the leaders were found the same way: hanged, beheaded, their feet chopped off.”

  “Hell of a way to make your point,” Chavez said.

  Rounds asked, “Jack, where’s the site run out of?”

  “That’s the kicker,” he responded. “It’s Benghazi.”

  “Bingo,” said Dominic. “This thing coming so close on top of the Tripoli embassy… How much you wanna bet we’re looking at the fallout from an unsanctioned mission?”

  There were no takers at the table.

  “What if it’s more than punishment?” Jack offered.

  “Explain,” Rounds said.

  Clark answered, “It’s a warning. That Lebanon thing… Two weeks later, Hamas tried to ram a car bomb into the British embassy about a block from the bus explosion. It fell through because their intel people were still cranking away on the bus bombing.”

  “Same principle could be at work here,” Jack said. “They’re telling the other cells to mind their manners.”

  “Yeah, but in favor of what?” Chavez asked.

  53

  THE GRAVEL ROADWAY leading away from the beach looked almost pristine, probably because there was little, if any, traffic on it, and not even much in the way of animals to trample on it, and the harsh weather either killed or stunted anything that tried to grow.

  Musa gave their captain, Vitaliy, a final wave, then nodded solemnly at Idris, whom he’d ordered to stay behind. However unlikely, if the captain tried to leave before they returned, Idris would kill the two Russians. Piloting the boat back to port without them would be a challenge, but Allah would show them the way.

  Musa climbed into the cab’s passenger seat. Fawwaz, already behind the wheel, started the engine while Numair and Thabit climbed into the bed.

  “Go,” Musa ordered. “The sooner we finish what we came to do, the sooner we can leave this cursed place.”

  Fawwaz shoved the gearshift into drive and started up the hill.

  The lighthouse and its neighboring hut were only a kilometer away, maybe five hundred meters uphill. Vitaliy and Vanya sat in the wheelhouse swivel chairs and watched their progress through binoculars, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, and wishing for more food, while the music on the radio got worse. Fred’s watchdog stood at the rail, watching them both. To the east was kelly-green tundra, and the view was as featureless as what a mouse might see when contemplating a green carpet.

  Vitaliy watched as two of the charter party stepped out of the truck, then used hand signals to direct the driver to back up to the steel shed.

  Vitaliy had never seen one of the generators that ran the lighthouses. He’d heard they contained radioactive material, though how they worked was beyond his knowledge. He’d heard also that some had disappeared, but if so, it hadn’t happened to an important lighthouse on his part of the coast. As far as he knew, they might well be small diesel generators. The lightbulb on the house was usually a small one, hardly ever more than one hundred watts, a fact that surprised-indeed, amazed-those who didn’t know about it. The Fresnel lenses focused the light into a small, pencil-thin beam whose effective range was determined by the height of the house, and any light showed up brightly on a dark night. Lighthouses, he told himself, were an obsolete leftover from earlier times, hardly necessary anymore in the age of electronic aids. So what damage might he be doing, really? His charter party would themselves finance his acquisition of a modern GPS system, probably one of the new Japanese ones that sold for five or six hundred euros, cheaper than the new car he coveted. And what the hell did it matter?

  That this could kill thousands of people never occurred to him for a moment.

  It took four hours, far less than Fred had suggested. It might have gone faster still if they’d simply demolished the corrugated shed, but evidently they didn’t want to do that. The lighthouse would look entirely normal in daylight (with the sun fully up and out, it was difficult to tell if the light was on or off), and at night, few came into this gulf to notice. And even if they did, so many things in Russia didn’t operate as designed that one more would hardly be seen as headline news. Two cups of tea and five cigarettes after they’d started, the truck rumbled back to life and started driving down the gravel driveway to the boat. It wasn’t until they reversed direction to back in that Vitaliy saw something dangling from the crane, about a meter, roughly rectangular, but with curved edges that suggested a cylinder inside, maybe the size of an oil drum. So that was a lighthouse battery? He’d wondered what they looked like, and wondered how they worked. It seemed awfully large to power such a small lightbulb. That made it typically Soviet, of course: large, clunky, but generally functional.

  One of the party walked backward behind the crane truck, guiding it back onto the boat, and after three hours, when the tide was again right, it was time to raise the ramp and depart. The man in the truck’s cab worked the crane controls to lower the generator to the deck. The colleagues didn’t secure it in place. They were not seamen, but they had a lot of euros.

  Vitaliy set the engines in reverse and backed away into deeper water, then spun the wheel to head back northwest for the Kara S
trait. So he’d earned his two thousand or so euros. In the process he’d burn perhaps a thousand of that in diesel fuel-actually less, but his charter party didn’t know that-and the rest was wear and tear on his T-4 landing craft, and his own valuable time, of course. So a task halfway completed. On getting back to port, he’d unload them and let them go wherever it was they wanted to go. He didn’t even wonder where that might be. He didn’t care enough to want to know. He checked his chronometer. Fourteen hours exactly. So he’d not make port before the end of the day, one more day to bill them for, and that was fine with him.

  Unaware that there was a complementary mission under way three hundred miles away, Adnan and his men were preparing to leave the relative comfort of the boat. The captain, Salychev, was maneuvering the Halmatic into a cove on the island’s western coast. Adnan stood on the afterdeck, watching the snow-encrusted arms of the inlet close in around them until the passage was no wider than a kilometer. The fog continued to build over the water’s surface until Adnan could catch only fleeting glimpses of the cliffs, erosion-slashed brown escarpments studded with scree and boulders.

  The Halmatic’s diesel engine chugged softly while in the wheelhouse Salychev whistled to himself. Adnan walked forward and stepped inside.

  “How far are we from the settlement-”

  “Belushya Guba,” Salychev finished for him. “Not far. Just up the coast-a hundred, hundred-fifty kilometers. Don’t worry yourself. The patrols don’t come into the coves; they stick to the shoreline. Might hear them if the wind is right, but this close to land, their navigation radars get jumbled. Couldn’t see us unless they bumped into us.”

  “Were there detonations in this area?”

  “Some, but that was back in ’60 or ’61. Small ones, too. No more than fifteen kilotons. Just babies, nothing to worry about. Now, up the coast, maybe three hundred kilometers north of Belushya Guba, is Mityushev. That’s where they did a lot of them. Dozens upon dozens, all in the hundreds of kilotons, a couple of megatons, too. If you want to see what the moon looks like, that’s the place to go.”