“You have?” I wanted to hear more, because CNO had indeed begun to see a new and particularly virulent form of terror. It had been one of the reasons behind my trip to Cairo.
Sir Aubrey nodded. “Yes. If you look at quantitative studies only, there’s been nothing but the slow increase to which you probably refer. But if you overlay that material with political reporting, there seems to be an emerging pattern of global terrorism—transnational terrorism is what the admirals and I called it—that is unprecedented.”
That was CNO’s theory, too. But within the Pentagon, no one else had drawn similar conclusions. Why had that happened? The answer is simple: because no one ever overlays intelligence. Why? Because intelligence agencies, like virtually every command structure, are what can be called stovepipe commands.
In essence, that means DIA people report to DIA. CIA people report to CIA. The State Department has its own intel structure. Each has its own mission; each has its own objectives. DIA leans heavily toward TECHINT; CIA keeps its eye on eco-political developments; and State focuses on internal politics. Moreover, each agency guards its information jealously. Not for security reasons, but so as to preserve its budgetary sanctity.
Oh, sure, there’s the National Security Council, which is supposed to provide intelligence policy for the president. But in reality, the NSC spends most of its time fighting a constant turf war with the Department of State. Then there are the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. They’re supposed to provide an independent view on the nation’s overall intel priorities. In fact, both boards are filled with cabinet rejects, political cronies, and wanna-bes.
Finally, there’s the Intelligence Community Staff, which sits at 1776 G Street, not a thousand feet from the Oval Office. ICS is run by a three-star—these days it was an Air Force lieutenant general. Allegedly, ICS coordinates the flow of intelligence. What it really does is referee turf battles between the various spook agencies.
Bottom line? Nowhere in the community was there a “big picture” outfit—somewhere that took nuggets from everyone and tried to make sense of them.
But CNO had. He’d done it by reading State Department cables (God knows how he’d laid his hands on them), DIA reports, and CIA position papers. He’d gathered NATO materials on Western Europe. He’d pieced together NSA intercepts from the Balkans and Southwest Asia. He’d snared Drug Enforcement Agency studies.
He, too, had often spoken of a new terrorism—terrorism without borders or specific nationality—whose one focus was the destruction of the West. It was an enlargement of the battle that had been going on for some years, directed against the West by mullahs, from Beni Saf in Algeria, to Kabul, Afghanistan. But this new wave was infinitely more dangerous. It was being waged by an army of mujahideen soldiers recruited from all over the Muslim world. They were being trained together at sites in northwest Afghanistan. Their funding was coming from Iran, and also by the burgeoning heroin traffic in Afghanistan. Their leadership was unknown.
CNO had mentioned all this to me shortly before I’d taken my Green Team squad to Egypt. He’d bitched that his fellow service chiefs hadn’t reacted positively to his theory, but he was convinced that he was correct, and what’s more, his old friend Admiral Sir Norman Elliott of the Royal Navy thought much the same way he did.
He believed that Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin was a small but significant part of this new form of worldwide terror, which is why he’d gone to the mat so that I could snatch him. We’d agreed to explore things in detail when I returned. Now, CNO and Sir Norman were dead, but Sir Aubrey was covering the same ground.
“I believe the bombing at Portsmouth could be part of that pattern,” he said.
I asked why he thought so.
“I’ll get to that in good time.” Sir Aubrey sipped his wine. “As I was saying, I know about your work—CNO was quite specific with me when it came to describing your capabilities.”
“CNO and I thought alike when it came to counterterror.”
He nodded. “I know. And you’ve been hard at work. Very commendable.”
I saluted him with my glass. “Thank you.”
He raised his glass as well, sipped, and replaced it on the napery. “Now, as to your question about the Portsmouth bombing. In the past week, there have been six seemingly unconnected terrorist acts.” He sipped his wine. “Have you been informed about them?”
I told Sir Aubrey I’d been out of touch. He brushed a fleck of something from his chest. “Ah, of course. That would be Cairo. Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin. Too bad about him. I would have liked to see his debrief.”
I must have flushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No matter.” He shrugged. “I can tell you, Dick, that there is very little in the CT arena that I do not learn about.” He paused to let that sink in. “Don’t worry, I have no intention of passing the information on to your Admiral Prescott.”
I guess the look on my face betrayed me. I shifted course. “Sounds like you have a wide net, Sir Aubrey.”
He said nothing. The Cheshire-cat smile on his face told the whole story.
“You were talking about unconnected terrorist acts this past week.”
“Ah, yes.” He paused as the waiter bore down on us and slid two plates onto the table, then meticulously spooned clumps of brown substance from a large porcelain au gratin dish onto them. I guess it was curry, although it didn’t look or smell like any curry I’d ever eaten. Two sauce boats of chutney were served, as well as relish dishes of shredded coconut and chopped peanuts.
I looked up. “Is there any hot sauce?”
The waiter appeared shocked. “The curry is Madras recipe, sir. It is already quite piquant.”
I tasted. It was as spicy as glue. “May I have some hot sauce, please?”
“If you insist.”
“I insist.”
Sir Aubrey watched as I dumped half a bottle of red chili sauce on my plate and mixed it with the alleged curry.
“You were saying, Sir Aubrey?”
He put a forkful of curry in his mouth and chewed. “I find this curry quite spicy.” He filled my wineglass, then his. “In the past six days, the main train station in Moscow was bombed. So was the Belgian diamond exchange in Antwerp, and the Italian stock-market building in Milan. There was an explosion at a French power plant that disrupted one quarter of the country’s electric supply, while within hours, in Frankfurt, an explosion disabled the city’s subway system for two days. More puzzling is the fact that no one credible has claimed credit for any of those actions.”
“You said six—you listed only five.”
“Ah—of course, there was the strike at Portsmouth.”
I sipped my wine. “You believe they’re all connected?”
“I do—as examples of this new, transnational terror.”
“Most people would consider your premise a hard sell, Sir Aubrey, especially as there have been no sort of common demands—not even any messages from the perpetrators.”
He looked at me with sadness. “I realize that. In fact, I tried to convince Admiral Prescott when he and I met yesterday, but he quite disagreed. He completely discounts a transnational pattern. His theory centers on the Iraqis, which is how his investigators are proceeding. It’s all quite irrational, of course, but there was no dissuading him. He seems to be quite fixated.”
“Pinky gets that way.”
“Pity.” Sir Aubrey wiped the corner of his mouth with the napkin. “But you don’t consider it a ‘hard sell’?”
“Not at all.” The transnational theory had always made sense to me. I believed, for example, that Mahmoud Azziz was representative of this new trend. He was an Egyptian who had been trained by the CIA in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. Years later, he’d put that training to use again as a member of the Egyptian Mujahideen, a small fundamentalist group based in Cairo that uses terror tactics against the Egyptian government to f
orce it to become a fundamentalist Islamic republic. The Egyptian Mujahideen, in turn, is part of the worldwide organization known as the Islamic Brotherhood, which channeled drug money from Afghanistan, and oil revenues from Iran, to groups like Azziz’s, for the purpose of furthering Islamic fundamentalism by any means possible. So Azziz had been sent from Cairo to the United States to create chaos and terror. When we’d captured him, he was on his way to Pakistan, where he’d probably link up with more tangos and go who knows where to create further mayhem.
There were hundreds of thousands more like Azziz—and hundreds, if not thousands—of local fundamentalist groups scattered all over the globe. After all, the U.S. had spent billions equipping and funding mujahideen guerrillas during their fifteen-year war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Among them were the more than twenty-five thousand Muslim volunteers engaged by the CIA. They were mostly poor, unschooled Arabs, recruited from mosques from Brooklyn to Baluchistan, by using a dozen different front organizations.
Now, I said to Sir Aubrey, it was common knowledge that many of those fighters, and much of the CIA’s equipment, were being turned against the West. In the former Yugoslavia, Muslim veterans of the Afghanistan campaign were fighting alongside Bosnian Muslims. The same C-4 and Semtex explosive that had been humped by camel from Peshawar through the Khyber Pass a decade ago was now being used by mujahideen fighting sectarian guerrilla wars in Kashmir, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan. Stinger antiaircraft missiles used to bring down Soviet MiGs and MI-24 Hind gunship choppers on the outskirts of Kabul were reappearing from the Balkans to Somalia, where they were employed against Western aircraft.
There was also something I didn’t tell him. I didn’t add that I knew some of those lethal supplies had been smuggled into the U.S., where Mahmoud Azziz had used them to blow up half a dozen targets across the country. I also didn’t tell him that when we’d snapped Mahmoud Azziz up in Cairo, he’d been carrying a passport with a Pakistani visa and fifty thousand English pounds.
I knew that a decade ago, it was from Peshawar in northern Pakistan that busloads of Muslim volunteers made their way to CIA-run training camps in northwest Afghanistan. Today, those buses were still filled with disaffected Muslims from Egypt, Algeria, the former Soviet Union, and even America. Members of scores of terror organizations—from huge ones like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to such tiny splinter groups as the South Yemen Liberation Army—traveled to mujahideen training camps in northwest Afghanistan, where they were taught how to seek revenge against the West.
And their motivation? It could be found every day in the newspapers. The fact that Israel was making peace with its Arab neighbors was bad enough—that, alone, was reason for a holy war. But there were other events as well. Muslims in the Balkans were slaughtered by both Croats and Serbs, and the West did nothing to stop the carnage. In the former Soviet Union, Azerbaijani Muslims were facing ethnic cleansing by Armenian Christians—and the Russians just looked on. Throughout Western Europe, ultranationalists threw Molotov cocktails at boardinghouses and dormitories full of Muslim workers, and the police always seemed to have trouble arresting the guilty parties.
I said I’d learned from research that the sole element keeping hundreds of thousands of alienated, impoverished, disenfranchised Muslim fundamentalists from consolidating was a natural tendency toward tribalism. “The old philosophy—‘My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world’—is still the prevalent modus vivendi throughout most of the Muslim world,” I said, watching as Sir Aubrey nodded in agreement.
I swallowed a fork of tasteless curry. “But, if the Muslim fundamentalists worldwide could be fused into a single camp with a single goal, they’d present a threat to the West even more dangerous than the Soviets. Because with the Soviets, the specter of massive retaliation kept them at arm’s length. To a mujahideen warrior, Sir Aubrey, a bullet in the brain means a guaranteed trip to heaven.”
“Precisely.” He drained his glass and refilled it. “Now, let us suppose that the tribalism is being overcome—that all these incidents are actually being directed by a single source and focused against the West.”
“That would make it the largest terrorist organization in the world.”
“Indeed it would, Captain.” He paused. “Have you ever read any history? Arab history?”
I had, and I said so.
“What do you know about Saladin?”
“That he was what—an eleventh- or twelfth-century Egyptian. A warrior. He took Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Built the wall that still surrounds the Old City.”
“Very good. But there was something else about him, too. He was the first Pan-Arab. The first son of Islam to try to consolidate all Arab people under the green banner of the prophet Muhammad.”
“He failed.”
“Yes, he did. The times were not right. But for centuries thereafter, his Pan-Arab legacy lived on. A single, nontribal Islamic culture spread from Spain to the Indian Ocean, from the Urals to the equator. And ever since, there have been Arabs who dreamed the same dream as Saladin: to unite all of Islam under the green flag.”
He had a point. I thought about it. “I can think of three recently: Assad of Syria, Muammar Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein.”
“Yes—of course, before them came Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was able to unify Syria and Egypt back in the fifties.” Sir Aubrey paused. “It was to be the first building block of a unified Arab nation encircling the Mediterranean.”
“He failed. So did the others.”
“Yes. For a number of reasons. Perhaps most significantly, because each of them was ultimately a nationalist, and each represented only a small segment of Islam. None, therefore, was able to win more than parochial support. Besides, what are men like Nasser, Assad, Saddam, and Qaddafi at their core? They’re politicians. Islam will never be reunited by a mere politician.
“But what happens if a new Saladin appears on the scene? A visionary; an individual who represents no single nation, no specific segment of Araby; a man who exemplifies true Pan-Arabism, and who can unite Saudis and Sudanese, Yemenites, Moroccans, Syrians, Afghanistanis, Baluchistanis—the whole patchwork of Islam from Casablanca to Peshawar.”
I pondered the possibilities. I didn’t like what I came up with at all. “Isn’t it highly unlikely that such an individual could exist, given the political situation today?”
“Unlikely?” Sir Aubrey’s fish-eyes wandered toward the square. “Certainly, it is unlikely,” he said, his voice distant and detached. “But, dear sir, it is not entirely impossible. CNO didn’t think it impossible. Neither did Sir Norman. And neither do I. That is why I insisted to your Admiral Prescott that you and your unit be seconded to me for the immediate future.”
Pinky hadn’t told me that. He’d said only that I’d be working with Sir Aubrey’s people. There’s a big difference between “working with” and “commanded by,” and I said so in unequivocal terms.
He poured the last of the wine equally into our glasses. “I understand.” His voice took on a steely tone. “But you are on sovereign British soil, Captain, and I must insist on maintaining command and control. This is not Egypt, after all. Make no mistake—I need your help. Moreover, I want it. But you must work in concert with our assets, and under our direction. CNO said he had to keep you on a short leash, and he warned me to do the same, should our paths ever cross.”
Tough as those words were to swallow, they sounded just like CNO to me. God, I missed the old warhorse.
Sir Aubrey must have seen something in my face. The tinge of a wistful smile crossed his own—a cloud’s shadow moving across a meadow. “He used to call you his favorite junkyard dog, you know.” It was the first trace of emotion he’d shown all evening.
“Canis lupus Marcinko—that’s me.”
“I’m sure of it.” He drained the last of the wine. “And I know we will all work splendidly together.” His expression brightened. “Despite the fact that no one has taken credit f
or the incident at Portsmouth, we obtained some good operational intelligence late today—intelligence that points the finger toward certain fundamentalist groups, and we want to exploit it to our benefit. There have been definite positive developments. As you can imagine, I do not want to speak of them now. But if you can come to my offices tomorrow morning at ten …”
Such gents, these Brits—making war by banker’s hours. Well, it wasn’t my style to wait around. “Pardon my French, but what the fuck, Sir Aubrey—let’s move now. Why sit on it?”
“Because—”
“‘Because’? Screw excuses. My CNO is dead. So is your goddamn Admiral of the friggin’ Fleet. But all you seem to want to do is sit on your fat ass sucking down your fucking Old Boat, while there are tango assholes out there laughing at both of us.” I stood up. “That ain’t my style, Sir Aubrey. I’m not one of your newfangled C squared CO Navy types.”
“What?”
“Can’t Cunt Commanding Officers. Cockbreaths who only pay lip service to their mission orders. Lemme tell you, Sir Aubrey, I joined the fucking Navy at seventeen to fulfill my military obligation. I discovered I had a career when I joined the Teams. And when I was commissioned, when I became a SEAL—it became an obsession.” I put my face up to his. “And I don’t do my job by sitting on my butt and asking,‘May I?’”
His face flushed. “Nevertheless …”
“Look—like you say, this is your country. But it was my CNO who got killed. I want a piece of the fucking action, and I want it now.”
He looked at me in an infuriatingly unruffled manner. “Believe me, Captain, you will get your piece of, as you say, ‘the fucking action.’ But you will get it tomorrow. At ten. In my office.”
He turned toward the window and stared out at St. James’s Square. In the darkness outside I could distinguish the outline of an immense Bentley limousine as it glided from starboard to port to a stop in front of the club.
“Ah, I see my car has arrived.” He rose, dropped his napkin on the table, brushed off the front of his bespoke suit, and started toward the dining-room doors. “Good night, Captain,” he said without turning.
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