by John Weisman
He reached into his pocket, then extended his hand. Half a dozen coins clattered into Charlie’s bowl.
Charlie’s hands covered his face in a gesture of gratefulness. “Thanks be to God, brother, and to you.”
“God is all merciful,” the major said, not bothering to look at Charlie. He stepped into the street, his free arm raised to stop traffic, and crossed, heedless of the honking and cursing of drivers.
Charlie counted to twenty-five, not daring to look up, concentrating on the coins in the bowl. Only when he heard the Mercedes’ distinctive horn sound twice did he watch the car nose into traffic. Its tinted windows were rolled up.
He waited until they’d driven off, then fingered the coins to make sure they were real and not tracking devices.
Was he being paranoid?
No. He was being careful.
Careful because today the game had changed. Exponentially. Five teams. And Saif Hadi al Iraqi, working as an ISI finger-man.
The Paks were tightening the screws. Whatever had triggered their tripwire, it was undeniable they’d sensed something was up. Here. In beautiful downtown Abbottabad. This was not good news. Not for Charlie. Or Langley.
3
Langley, Virginia
December 7, 2010, 0645 Hours Local Time
Once upon a time, Anthony Vincent Mercaldi, currently the twenty-first director of the CIA, had been a California attorney. He also had been a civil rights lawyer at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Nixon administration and an eight-term Democratic congressman, which he followed with an eighteen-month stint as director of the Office of Management and Budget. When the forty-second president of the United States realized at the height of the 1994 presidential campaign that he needed a real adult to oversee the unruly adolescents working in his White House, he’d appointed Mercaldi to be his chief of staff.
In other words, Anthony Vincent Mercaldi, who insisted that everybody call him Vince, was one of Washington’s maybe half-dozen Big Time, Major League, superstar go-to guys.
Normally at this hour, Call Me Vince would have been doing his daily five miles on a treadmill in the basement gym at CIA headquarters, watching Al Jazeera’s English-language channel, CNN International, or the Beeb.
But 0645 in Langley, Virginia, was 1545 in Abbottabad, Pakistan—3:45 PM in civilianspeak.
And Abbottabad was on Vince’s mind. More to the point, Charlie Becker was on his mind.
He’d met personally with Charlie three weeks before he left for Bagram to do his final mission prep. Invited Charlie for a one-on-one lunch on fine bone china bearing the CIA seal in the private Director’s Dining Room that was adjacent to his office. Of course he had. Vince Mercaldi was a congressman at heart. He’d always thought of the House of Representatives as the People’s House, and for the sixteen years he held office he’d taken as much time as needed to get together with his constituents whenever they came calling or when he was back home taking the political pulse of his district.
He brought that meet-and-greet tradition with him to the seventh-floor suite of offices at Langley when he became D/CIA. How, he had reasoned, could you ask a man or woman to put their lives on the line and not look them in the eye?
So now he was reading the flash cable Charlie had burst-transmitted as soon as he could after his encounter with Saif Hadi al Iraqi. And Vince was worried. About Charlie, whom he both liked and admired, and about The Operation.
It wasn’t the first time The Operation he’d fought to mount had been jeopardized. The previous October, just as CIA’s Bin Laden Group (BLG), the successor to Alec Station, the first of the CIA’s working groups devoted exclusively to Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, was setting up the Abbottabad safe house, some idiot NATO officer (Vince had his staff run it to ground and discovered the culprit was a pussy-chasing Norwegian lieutenant colonel trying to ingratiate himself with a Brussels-based female reporter) had told CNN that UBL wasn’t hiding in some cave in Afghanistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but living the life of Reilly in a villa somewhere in northwest Pakistan.
Of course, CNN immediately put it on the air. Who wouldn’t have?
At Langley, bells and whistles went off. By October the BLG had more than 250 people working under the cover of CIA’s Special Activities Division, but in point of fact it was a stand-alone unit reporting directly to two people: CIA Director Vince Mercaldi and Stuart Kapos, the director of the National Clandestine Service, the successor to the old Directorate of Operations.
A straight line. No middlemen.
BLG was virtually unique at Langley in that unlike most covert units, its existence had never leaked. The whole world knew that there was a CIA Bin Laden unit called Alec Station. Indeed a former Alec Station chief was a constant bloviator on cable news shows, where he pummeled CIA regularly. And everyone knew about CIA’s CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, originally created by the legendary spy Duane “Dewey” Clarridge in 1986 and still in full operation against America’s enemies.
But very few individuals—certainly no one on leak-prone Capitol Hill—were cleared to know about the covert intelli-gnomes who had been working in a secure, cipher-locked suite of offices located in the subbasement of the new CIA headquarters building since late the previous July. The individuals who worked there were listed under their previous assignments. The sign on the door read “Special Activities Division: AFPAK Technical Support Group.” And that’s how the unit was listed in CIA’s internal phone book. But it was BLG—all Bin Laden, all the time.
It was a potpourri of talent, each one hand-picked. There were linguists, analysts, and operations officers from the National Clandestine Service and its Special Activities Division (SAD); there were intel squirrels, psy-ops specialists, SEALs, Delta Force operators, and other snake-eating individuals from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and there were Soldiers and contractors from the Army’s most nimble counterterrorist-slash-counterinsurgency-slash-unconventional warfare unit, the Asymmetric Warfare Group from Fort Meade, Maryland.
It was a first: BLG was a task force of organically integrated intelligence and operations personnel with an established chain of command and the authority to initiate both long-term and actionable intelligence gathering and then exploit that intel in its own unilateral operations. It was a seamless integration of CIA’s intelligence-gathering and paramilitary capabilities and JSOC’s unique talent pool. Its budget ran well into ten figures. And it all revolved around one mission objective: to find and kill Usama Bin Laden.
Some of the personnel had been focused on Bin Laden for more than a decade. But the BLG was the first entity that allowed them to work as part of a holistic team. For the first few weeks, BLG had met only at night, so its members wouldn’t attract attention. Then, when the information started to build more rapidly, they went full time with Vince Mercaldi’s complete support. In fact from the very first days, the director met daily with BLG’s chief, Richard Hallett, to monitor the group’s progress.
And on the first of September, Hallett told Call Me Vince that they had found UBL—at least they believed strongly that they’d found the sonofabitch. The courier named Tareq Khan, the man who used the phrase al mas, “the Diamond,” had returned to the villa. The people at BLG were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tareq had come home in order to deliver a long-awaited message to Usama.
Tareq’s return to Abbottabad was one of the reasons Charlie Becker was now in Pakistan. And why Dick Hallett, a supergrade spook who’d come of age in the Marine Corps but spent the past twenty-nine years as an operations officer in some of the world’s most nasty places, had, by Labor Day and with the strong encouragement of Vince Mercaldi and D/NCS Kapos, begun some complicated and hugely sensitive advance work. Hallett’s efforts resulted in the establishment of a covert CIA safe house 250 yards from the Abbottabad villa in which Hallett and his top analyst, whom he called Spike, believed Usama Bin Laden was living.
The reverberations had taken almost a week to quell.
That first day of panic, Vince Mercaldi himself assumed hands-on management of BLG’s damage control. He had the presence of mind—the genius, Dick Hallett said later—to immediately call Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat, consummate Washington insider, and the president’s special envoy to Pakistan.
Dick Holbrooke had no idea what was going on in Abbottabad because, as one of Washington’s most sieve-like leakers, he of all people wasn’t cleared to know. Which is why Vince called him and told him in hushed tones, “This is for your ears only, Dick, please! I can assure you that so far as CIA is concerned, the CNN story is pure horse puckey. It’s wishful thinking. Irresponsible fiction. NATO’s got its head up its ass.”
That confidential whisper was passed on to Holbrooke’s press corps favorites within minutes. On background, of course.
Vince laughed out loud when he’d read his precise words—the printable ones, unattributed—in the next day’s papers.
These were dicey times, when the Justice Department was crawling all over CIA looking to prosecute someone, anyone because of those so-called enhanced interrogation methods. And congressional intelligence oversight committees were demanding that CIA never lie, cheat, steal, or do anything that Boy Scouts wouldn’t do. Which is why Vince’s staff had to be goddamn contortionists to come up with on-the-record answers that were misleading enough to put the story to sleep, but not come back and bite CIA on its well-scarred ass when the truth about Abbottabad finally came out.
Vince focused on Charlie Becker’s cable. Five teams of Paki gumshoes and one Guantánamo knucklehead—a very dangerous Guantánamo knucklehead, to boot—working a city of thirty-five thousand. Shit.
“Obviously, the Pakistanis are worried, right?” He shook the sheet of paper at the National Clandestine Service’s top spook. “Stu, whatta you think?”
Stuart Kapos had twenty-eight years under his belt as an officer in CIA’s clandestine service. Now he ran it. A big man who’d played football at the Naval Academy, he still ran marathons at age fifty-five. Kapos, who was known Agency-wide as a no-shit guy, sipped his coffee, placed the mug on the glass top of the director’s desk, and leaned back in the armchair that faced Mercaldi. “I think what you think, Boss. The Paks are worried that we’re doing something.” He smiled. “And y’know, they’re right.”
“We have no proof UBL’s in Abbottabad.”
“Not yet.”
“And we’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars to this operation so far—with no real evidence that he’s there.”
“You know who they used to quote at the Academy? John Paul Jones: ‘He who will not risk cannot win.’ ”
“Easy for you to say,” the D/CIA said. “You’re covert. I’m the one who’s gonna get his ass handed to him in public if I have to tell Congress we’ve flushed a shitload of the people’s money down the toilet.”
“That’s why you got the big car and all those bodyguards.” Kapos scratched his shaved head. “I spoke with Dick Hallett and Spike before I came up here. Let me give you BLG’s take on Charlie’s cable. They say, Okay, let’s say the Paks know—or at least a few of them know—UBL actually is in the Khan brothers’ compound in Abbottabad. So, the Paks think, what if those stupid Americans might have listened to that NATO guy, and now they’re starting to wonder if UBL isn’t hiding out in some cave in Waziristan, but living large in Pakistan. And what if the Great Satan is sending the dreaded CIA onto our sovereign soil to check the NATO story out. And what if the Great Satan has spies in Abbottabad, where we know UBL is stashed, and they actually find him. Then we Pakistanis are fucked. Because we’ve lied to our biggest cash cow.”
“Hmmm. And?”
“And so Spike’s analysts believe the Paks—or at least those Paks protecting UBL—are sending a full-court press of ISI co-conspirators to Abbottabad to make sure we’re specifically not operating there.”
The director scratched his ear.
Kapos continued: “Because they’re sure as hell not pulling a full-court press anywhere else. Not Lahore, not Peshawar, not Islamabad or Karachi or Rawalpindi. Nowhere but Abbottabad.
“Spike takes this full-court press as a very positive sign. Because you know and I know that when we lay our hands on UBL—and we will—and he’s been living in a city where all the top generals and intelligence pashas retire? UBL surrounded by the cream of Pakistan’s military and intelligence crop? And if we kill him right under their noses? They’ll do more than shit a few bricks. They’ll shit Yankee fucking Stadium.”
“Hmmm.” The director sat silently for half a minute, contemplating the ceiling. Then he said, “Okay, Stu, let’s say you’re right. UBL’s in Abbottabad. So, what do we do to keep the Paks at bay?”
Kapos shrugged and pointed to the coffee cup he had set down on the director’s desk. “Follow the instructions on my mug.”
Vince turned the mug until he could read what was printed on it: “ADMIT NOTHING. DENY EVERYTHING. FILE COUNTERCHARGES.” He laughed. “That’s it?”
“Well, in a nutshell, yes.”
“Funny, Stu. Very funny.” The director’s expression turned serious. “Look, if BLG is right, then we have to distract them. Draw their attention away from Abbottabad. From Valhalla. Divert their focus.”
“Exactly,” Kapos’s head nodded in agreement. “Remember Sun Tzu.”
Vince’s brow furrowed. “Sun Tzu?”
“He wrote, ‘All warfare is deception.’ ” The operations officer sipped his coffee. “Today’s Pearl Harbor Day. Remember how the Japanese kept Roosevelt busy negotiating smoke and mirrors while Isoroku Yamamoto’s fleet was steaming east to Hawaii? We need to expose the Pakis to some of the same kind of three-card Monte smoke and mirrors.”
Vince laid Charlie’s cable on his desk facedown and moved his hands back and forth across the glass as if he were shifting folded playing cards. “Keep your eyes on the ace and win twenty bucks.”
“Which you never win. Exactly.”
The D/CIA stared at his deputy. “And I bet you already have a deception operation in mind.”
Stu Kapos hooked a thumb in his red-white-and-blue suspenders and Cheshire-cat smiled at his boss. “You got another ten minutes for me?”
“I’ve got all day if you need it.”
“Ten minutes. It’s so KISS.” Kapos caught the quizzical look on the D/CIA’s face. “KISS—Keep it simple, stupid.” He grinned “You’ll love it.”
“Do we have to brief the Hill?”
Kapos shook his head. “Nope, players are already all in place. I’ll use two teams from our Whiskey Trio targeting program. Whiskey Trio is run out of Special Activities Division. Congress was already briefed. So BLG can keep on keepin’ on.”
That made Vince happy. No congressional briefings meant no leaks. The D/CIA put both elbows on his desk and interlaced his fingers. “Talk away, Boychik.”
4
Cumberland Parkway, Virginia Beach, Virginia
December 9, 2010, 0510 Hours Local Time
Boatswain’s Mate Second Class (SEAL) Troy Roberts, BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS) Class 237, finished the eight minutes of stretching he did every morning so he wouldn’t cramp up as he ran his eight miles. This morning’s course would take him west, around Lake Trashmore, then south and east, where he ran the perimeter of the Bow Creek Country Club. Other days meant other routes. It was part of Roberts’s normal operational security pattern.
Op-sec was central to Troy’s lifestyle—and his family’s as well. Whenever she was asked, his wife, Brittany, would tell people that Troy worked as part of a Navy logistics team that supported the SEAL teams, even though she knew it was a lie. She lied because her husband w
as a Navy SEAL whose missions, like the actual name of his unit, were classified top secret.
The ability to maintain this bifurcated existence had been part of the selection process. Troy had undergone a battery of psychological tests to ensure that he was not a sociopath nor had any other personality disorder. The results also showed him to be the one in several hundreds of thousands of individuals who could kill efficiently, brutally, in any number of ways, then turn the switch and go home to be a loving father and husband. In other words, he was the ideal special warfare operator.
That was good, because the ultimate cost of his constant training would run into the low seven figures. He could pick locks, hotwire cars, work ciphers, jump out of perfectly good aircraft, and launch a minisub off the deck of a submerged nuclear boomer. During his short tenure in his current unit, the baby-faced youngster had killed more than two dozen individuals. Not at a distance, either, but up close and personal. And yet unlike the SEALs at Little Creek Amphibious Base, where SEAL Teams Two, Four, Eight, and Ten had their quarterdecks, Troy seldom wore the eagle, flintlock pistol, and trident device, ubiquitously known to SEALs as the Budweiser, in public.
That was because except on rare occasions, or when he was deployed overseas, Troy didn’t wear a uniform. He went to work in civvies, jeans mostly, and long overshirts that concealed the Glock 26 in its well-used Kydex and horsehide Crossbreed holster and the Emerson LaGriffe last-ditch knife that hung on a chain around his neck, both of which he carried even when he took his daily runs. Only when he had passed through the single-lane checkpoint that led to the Dam Neck Fleet Training Center, a twelve-minute commute from his home, would he sometimes change into some of the clothing and use some of the equipment the military had issued him.