Clancy, Tom - Op Center 09 - Mission of Honor

by Mission of Honor [lit]

  "But at some point, the Botswana military must move against them," Kline said.

  "Not if Dhamballa's end game is a modest one," Herbert said. "And we don't even know that this is Dhamballa. We also don't know what the master plan may look like, but I researched some of our databases before coming here. The Brush Vipers were one of four paramilitary groups that used to operate in that region of Botswana. Do you know where they got their weapons from?"

  "Not from the Botswana military, I hope," Kline replied.

  "No," Herbert replied. "Worse. They came from someone we dealt with years ago."

  "Who?" Kline pressed.

  "The Musketeer," Herbert replied. "Albert Beaudin."

  ELEVEN

  Paris, France Wednesday, 3:35 A.M.

  He had always worked late. Ever since he was a young man in occupied France.

  Albert Beaudin sat on the terrace of his apartment overlooking Champ de Mars. The night was cool but pleasant. Low, thin clouds were colored a murky orange black by the nighttime lights of Paris. To his left, the aircraft warning lights of the Eiffel Tower winked on and off. The top of the tower flirted with the passing clouds.

  Beaudin's earliest memory of the monument was also at night. It was after the Allies had come through Paris. That was when it was finally safe for his father and him to come to the city. What a night that had been. They had ridden for nearly twenty hours straight with little Albeit sprawled in the sidecar of a stolen German staff motorcycle. Albert was used to being up at night. Much of the work he had done was in the dark. But that night was special. He could still smell the diesel fuel. He could still hear his father and himself singing French folk songs as they sped through the countryside. By the time they reached Paris, they had no voices left. Albert had no derriere left either, after bumping around in the sidecar.

  But it did not matter. What a journey it had been. What a childhood he had lived.

  What a victory they had won.

  Maurice Beaudin had worked with Jean LeBeques, the legendary Le Conducteur de Train de la Resistance, the "Train Conductor of the Resistance." LeBeques ran a locomotive between Paris and Lyons. Lyons was where spare parts for the railroad were manufactured. Because of the city's central lo-

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  cation and relative proximity to Switzerland, the French Resistance was also based in Lyons. Personnel could be dispatched quickly to other parts of the nation or smuggled to safety in a neutral country.

  The Germans always sent a substantial military force with LeBeques. They wanted to make certain he was not bringing supplies to the Die Schlammgleisketten, as the Germans derisively referred to them. "The Mud Crawlers." The Germans were derisive, but they were not dismissive. From the time France surrendered in June of 1940 until the end of the war, the French Resistance was relentless. They sabotaged the German war effort and forced the enemy to keep much-needed resources in France.

  Albert and his father were among the earliest members of the resistance. Maurice Beaudin was a widower. He had a small plant that manufactured the fishplates used to join sections of rail. Maurice had known LeBeques for nearly thirty years. Both men happened to share a birthday, March 8, 1883. One evening, shortly after arriving, LeBeques presented Maurice with a cake. Written on the paper doily underneath was a message asking le receptif, the recipient, if he would be willing to fight for a free France. If so, he was to cut an X-shaped notch on the top left corner of the first crate he put on the train. Maurice did so. From that point forward, the men found ways to smuggle ammunition, spare parts for radios, and personnel on LeBeques's trains. By some miracle, both men managed to survive the war. Tragically, if ironically, LeBeques died in a train wreck late in 1945. He was busy transporting former resistance fighters home after the war.

  Albert was just six years old at the time. He attended school until two in the afternoon then went to the small factory to sweep. It was important to collect metal filings every day. Iron was scarce, and the scraps were melted down and reused. To this day, in his own munitions factories, the pungent smell of oiled metal, fresh from the lathe, brought Albert back to his youth.

  So did the idea of working with other dedicated individuals on a paramilitary undertaking.

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  Maurice had never hesitated to involve his young son in resistance operations.

  If France remained enslaved, Maurice reasoned, what was the point of growing older?

  Sometimes Albert had to distract soldiers by fighting with another boy or picking on a young girl. At other times he had to slip things onto the train while the adults created distractions. Throughout the rest of his life, Albert was never able to communicate to others the excitement of risking death. He had seen others, including his fourteen-year-old cousin Samuel, murdered for suspected acts of sabotage. He had watched men and women dragged in front of stone walls and shot, hanged from trees and streetlights, and even lashed to tractors or bales of hay and used for bayonet practice. Any of those things could have happened to Albert. He learned to accept danger as a part of life, risk as a part of reward. Those sensibilities remained with Albeit after the war. Fearlessness enabled him to expand his father's business into aircraft in the 1950s and munitions in the early 1960s.

  By the time he was in his midthirties, Albert Beaudin was a very wealthy man. But he had two regrets. The first was that his father died before he saw how vast the Beaudin empire had become. And the second was that France had failed to become a military and political force in the postwar world. The strongest free nation on the European continent, France was weakened militarily and politically by the defeat of its troops in Indochina in 1954 and then in Algeria in 1962. Hoping to restore French prestige in world affairs, France elected resistance leader Charles de Gaulle as president. De Gaulle made military independence from the United States and NATO one of his priorities. Unfortunately, that left France a virtual nonplayer in the Cold War. Instead of being embraced by the Soviet Union and the United States, France wanted to be independent. That left the nation mistrusted by both. The emergence of Germany and Japan as financial powers in the 1960s and 1970s was also something the French had not anticipated. That left France with wine, films, and posters of^the Eiffel Tower as their legacy for the latter twentieth century.

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  But while the century was finished, Albert Beaudin was not. Growing up as a resistance fighter had taught Albert never to be afraid of anything. It taught him never to accept defeat. And it taught him how to organize a small but devoted band into a powerful force.

  Albert heard a jet. He looked up. He watched as a lowflying aircraft threw cones of white light above the clouds. There must be severe storms to the south. Aircraft usually did not fly directly over the city this late.

  Albert listened until the roar of the jet engines had faded. Then he let his green eyes move across the rest of the dark Parisian skyline.

  There were indeed storms to the south. Storms that were going to sweep the world. Albert found himself staying up at night, recapturing the drama, risk, and excitement of the last great war he fought for his homeland.

  However, the results of this war would be different. It would be fought without the loss of French lives. It would be fought in a foreign land. And it would show the world what ingenuity and stealth could accomplish.

  It would also do one thing more. It would shift the center of world power from a handful of bellicose nations to a handful of men. Men who were impervious to bombs and sanctions.

  Men who would restore their homeland to a prominence it had not known for over two centuries.

  TWELVE

  Washington, D.C. Tuesday, 9:49 P.M.

  After meeting with Paul Hood and briefing Bob Herbert, Mike Rodgers went to his office. For the first time in weeks, he was energized.

  Over a year before, General Rodgers had talked to Hood about establishing a HUMINT team for Op-Center, one that would not only
gather information but have the ability to infiltrate enemy units if necessary. Events had forced them to put the idea on hold. Rodgers was glad to be bringing it back. He knew that spearheading a new HUMINT team would not ease the loss of the Strikers. It would not change the general's perception that he had mismanaged aspects of the Himalayan operation. It would not accomplish that any more than remanning Striker would have done. But Hood's aggressive step reminded Rodgers that command was not a profession for the timid.

  Or the self-pitying.

  The first thing Rodgers did was to access the computer files of the agents he and Hood had discussed. Op-Center kept track of all the operatives who had worked with them. The "cooperatives," as Bob Herbert called them. The COs were not aware of the electronic surveillance. Senior Computer Specialist Patricia Arroyo in Matt Stoll's office hacked everything from credit card transactions to phone bills. They did this for two reasons. First, Op-Center needed to be able to contact freelance agents quickly, if necessary. Covert operatives often resigned. They frequently dropped out of sight, changed addresses, and occasionally changed identities. But evejp if credit card numbers were different, purchase preferences and phone

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  contacts were the same. Those patterns were easy to locate and track to new credit cards or telephone numbers.

  The second reason Op-Center continued to watch former COs was to make certain that potential partners were not spending time with potential adversaries. Calls placed to cell phones were very closely monitored. Patricia had developed software to cross-reference these numbers with phones registered to embassy employees. Nearly 40 percent of all foreign service workers were intelligence gatherers. Tax documents and bank accounts were watched to make sure the sums matched. The records of family members were also collected. Wherever possible, computer passwords were broken and Emails read.

  Even experienced, well-intentioned intelligence workers could be tricked, seduced, bribed, or blackmailed.

  Locating Maria Corneja, David Battat, and Aideen Marley was not a problem.

  The thirty-eight-year-old Corneja, a Spanish Interpol agent, had recently married Darrell McCaskey. McCaskey was OpCenter's NAFIL-National and Foreign Intelligence Liaison. He had returned to Washington while Maria settled her affairs in Madrid. She would be joining her husband in a week.

  Forty-three-year-old David Battat was the former director of a CIA field office in New York City. Battat had recently returned to Manhattan after helping Op-Center stop a terrorist from sabotaging oil supplies in Azerbaijan. Thirty-four-yearold Aideen Marley was still in Washington. The former foreign service officer had worked with Maria Corneja, averting a Spanish civil war two years before. Now she was working as a political consultant for both Op-Center and the State Department.

  The other operatives were living in different parts of the world. Twenty-eight-year-old Falah Shibli was still working as a police officer in Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. A veteran of seven years in the Sayeret Ha'Druzim-Israel's elite Druze Reconnaissance unit-the Lebanon-born Israeli had assisted Op-Center in their Bekaa Valley operation.

  Forty-nine-year-old Harold Moore divided his time between

  London and Tokyo. Moore was a former G-man who had been recruited by McCaskey to help Op-Center with its first crisis, finding and defusing a terrorist bomb on board the space shuttle Atlantis. Feeling underappreciated, Moore had elected to take early retirement. He was now working as a consultant to both Scotland Yard's Specialist Operations Anti-Terrorist Branch and the Intelligence and Analysis Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Zack Bemler was based in New York. Bemler was a magna cum laude Ph.D. graduate in international security from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The young man had been courted by the CIA and the FBI but ended up working for World Financial Consultants, an international investment group. After rogue generals were prevented from overthrowing the legitimate government in Russia, then-political liaison Martha Mackall contacted Bemler. Bemler had dated Martha's kid sister Christine at Princeton. Together, Martha and Bemler worked to clean out the generals' bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The twenty-five million dollars was used to fund joint intelligence ventures between Paul Hood and Sergei Orlov's Russian Op-Center.

  Rodgers knew how to contact the personnel he wanted. He had the money to hire them. But numerous questions remained. Should he mix veterans with new personnel, combine new ideas with the old? Would these people consider working for Op-Center full-time, if at all? If so, where would they be based? Would it be practical to run an entirely freelance operation? Then there were logistic issues. They could not travel as a unit in a military transport, since those aircraft were routinely watched by satellite and on the ground. Upon arriving at an air base, they might be spotted and followed. But it was also unwise to put them on a single commercial flight. If one were identified, they might all be exposed.

  Rodgers also had to figure out how to run the unit. Covert operatives were more like artists than soldiers. They were creative individuals. They did not enjoy working ia*groups or doing things by the book.

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  The general wanted input from Herbert. He also wanted to talk to the spy chief about the way the team had come about. After the meeting with Hood, Mike Rodgers could think of nothing but the new team. It did not occur to him until hours later that it probably upset Herbert to be excluded from this process. As a former spy himself, Herbert had a great poker face. He might not have let his displeasure show to Rodgers. Herbert was also a team player. He would not want to dull Rodgers's enthusiasm.

  Unfortunately, Herbert had been busy for most of the day. Rodgers busied himself with the personnel files and other OpCenter business. That included daily military reports from around the world. Rodgers liked to keep track of former allies as well as potential enemies. A crisis management officer never knew when he would have to call on one group for assistance or fight the other.

  The night team came on at six P.M. That left Rodgers free to concentrate on the team and possible sites for a shakedown operation. He did not want to talk to any potential agents until he had something concrete to propose to them.

  It was shortly before ten P.M. when Bob Herbert finally returned Rodgers's call.

  "You were right," Herbert said.

  "Glad to hear it," Rodgers said. "About what?"

  "Something is going on in Botswana," Herbert said.

  It felt like it had been ages since Rodgers gave Herbert the newspaper. This had been a long day.

  Rodgers listened as Herbert told him about the meeting with Edgar Kline. It sounded like a regional scuffle until he mentioned the name Albert Beaudin. In intelligence circles, Beaudin was known as the Musketeer.

  "What does he have to do with this?" Rodgers asked.

  "I'm not sure he does," Herbert said. "But there is a connection between him and the Brush Vipers of thirty-odd years ago."

  Rodgers was concerned about that. He was also intrigued. Beaudin was a powerful but elusive figure. Since the early

  1960s, the industrialist was suspected of using a worldwide

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  network to provide arms to rebels, rogue nations, and both sides of Third World conflicts. His agents at customs checkpoints, in police stations, in shipping offices, and in factories enabled him to sidestep embargoes and arms bans. He provided arms to Central and South American rebels, to African warlords, and to Middle Eastern nations. His willingness to sell low-priced weapons to both Iran and Iraq was one of the reasons their war lasted for eight years in the 1980s. Even if he just broke even on the initial gun sales, Beaudin made money on the steady demand for ammunition and spare parts. Because rebel factions and smaller countries needed his weapons, they were never willing to help the United Nations, Interpol, or other i
nternational organizations investigate his activities. Because of Beaudin's influence among French politicians and military officials, they were also unwilling to cooperate. Op-Center had always suspected that Beaudin was one of the financial forces behind the New Jacobins, xenophobic terrorists they had fought in Toulouse several years before.

  "If Beaudin is involved, chances are we're probably not looking at a small event," Herbert said.

  "Or a short one," Rodgers added. "Whoever is behind this had to know the Vatican would get involved."

  "They were obviously counting on that," Herbert said. "The Church won't surrender its ministries. Kline is afraid that if this isn't an isolated attack, someone may be trying to create a schism."

  "Between?"

  "Catholics and people of indigenous faiths," Herbert said. "If someone pits religion against religion, you have a hotbutton issue that can blow up throughout the western world. It could fuel arms consumption all over Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia-"

  "Giving Beaudin a damn near bottomless market for his product," Rodgers said.

  "Right," Herbert said. "That's assuming Beaudin's involved in this, of course. There could be other people behind the abduction, international players we haven't even considered."

  "I'm also not ready to make the leap from the abduction of

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  Father Bradbury to a regional war," Rodgers said. "These things take time to develop."

  'True."

  "And a short-term conflict would be chump change to a guy like Beaudin," Rodgers said.

  "That said, all the war simulations in the regions show the potential for widespread pocket conflagrations," Herbert reminded him. "We might not see a pattern until local governments start falling. A religious war in Botswana would be the perfect trigger to start uprisings of all kinds among the disenfranchised."

  "The war sims also show the major powers being forced to contain those struggles, the way we did in Kashmir," Rodgers noted. "Too many nations have big, blow-down-the-door weapons. None of us can afford to let those come into play."