The Mercenary Option

by Dick Couch

  Steven Fagan was at his desk early the following day. He had thoroughly read and reread the intelligence summary Jim Watson had left them. This summary gave him two names to work with: Imad Mugniyah and Khalib Beniid. He had been on the phone most of the morning, and was waiting for another call to be put through when Janet Brisco tapped at his door. Steven motioned for her to come in. Just as she took a seat near his desk, the speaker on his phone crackled.

  “I’ll put you through to Mr. Beck now, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Steven replied. There was clicking as the connection was made. “Hello, Gerhardt, this is William Reasoner calling.”

  “Who?”

  “Reasoner, William Reasoner,” Fagan said, speaking louder.

  “William…Reasoner?”

  “That’s right. Look, Gerhardt, I understand it’s late there, but I have something that is rather important. Are you still there?”

  “Yes, but…but I don’t know about this. I…I—”

  “Now listen, Gerhardt. We’ve kept our end of the bargain pretty well, and it’s time for you do us a favor.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I—”

  Fagan again cut him off, and there was a hardness to his voice that Brisco had never heard before. “Now you listen to me, Gerhardt, and listen closely. I have your personal fax number, and I am going to fax you a list of names and a list of corresponding banks you deal with. You will check the names for numbered accounts and give me a detailed history if any of those numbered accounts have wired funds in or out during the last thirty days. Do you understand me?”

  “Well, I suppose perhaps I could try to—”

  “You will not try; you will do exactly as I have requested. I don’t want to have to remind you of the details of our arrangement. And your information had better be accurate, because as you know, we have ways to check on it. Is that also understood?”

  “Yes, William, I understand. I will call you—”

  “No, Gerhardt, I will call you. Wait there for my fax and look for my call back to you this time tomorrow.”

  “Yes, William, I will do as you say. I will expect your call. Good-bye.” There was an audible sigh as he broke the connection.

  Brisco waited while Steven tapped the international phone number into the fax machine. It sucked the paper through in a matter of seconds, but it would take several minutes to make the connection, synchronize the coded ciphers on the other end, and send the fax. She watched him with an expression of open admiration.

  “Damn, you can be a mean little son of a bitch when you want to be. Who was on the list of names?”

  “Every alias Imad Mugniyah and Khalib Beniid have ever used, plus a list of wealthy patrons of terror who have the means to finance an operation like this. Most of them are Saudi or Kuwaiti. We might get a break.”

  “So who was that Gerhardt dude you just put the spurs to?”

  “A Swiss banker. He was an asset several years ago, but at Langley we were finally asked to seek only voluntary and official cooperation from the international banking community. I recently learned that Gerhardt had got himself in a little financial trouble on the tables in Monte Carlo, and I was able to help him out. Now he has to help us out. He has the access, and there is very little chance of him being caught. He has a very senior position.”

  “Why, hell, he’s a banker. Couldn’t he just make himself a loan?”

  “Well.” Steven smiled. “It would have had to be a seven-figure loan, and then there’s the matter of an extramarital affair.”

  “Caught ole Gerhardt with his girlfriend, huh?”

  “Well…it was not quite a girlfriend.”

  Janet Brisco began to cackle. “You bad, Steven Fagan. A very, very bad man. What happens if he goes to the cops?”

  “Well, about all he can tell them is that he is being blackmailed by some guy named Reasoner from the CIA.”

  Brisco cackled again. “You’re not bad, you’re evil. Got any more of those calls to make? Maybe I could help. I’d love to get spy-mean with some dude on the phone.”

  “Ah, Janet, I think you better leave that to me. How’s the planning coming?”

  “Just waiting for your pal Watson to get back to us with some imagery and some troop dispositions. That’s one big area. We have to find a way to cut it down.” She got up to leave. “Let me know if you want me to do some of that heavy talk for you.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Steven said. He smiled after her, knowing she was only kidding him. Or was she?

  Steven made two more calls to bankers—one in the Caymans and one in Singapore. He reached both on secure commercial connections, which were quite standard in major international banks. One of his contacts he had to outright threaten, and the other seemed to almost welcome the call. A short time later he had fax confirmations back from both of them.

  Monday, December 23,

  Khalabad, Iran

  “So you want to take only one of the scientists with you?”

  “One will be sufficient, Dokhan,” Khalib replied to Mugniyah. “Since we will be taking only one weapon, we need only one scientist. Abramin has been training one of my people who is a capable technician. He was a medical student before he became a mountain fighter. But since we cannot complete the final assembly until we are across the mountains and into Afghanistan, we will need him with us.”

  Mugniyah did not want to appear to tell Khalib his business, but he had gone to great lengths to bring Moshe Abramin and his associate here to assemble the weapons. It made sense to load the gun before you left for the fight, and the assembly of a nuclear weapon was not something one would normally do in field conditions. Khalib sensed his apprehension.

  “Crossing the desert in Iran will not be pleasant, but it will be relatively easy. Once we cross the border into Afghanistan, we will have to travel through the mountains by foot and pack train. The weapon is heavy, more so now that we have the bomb casing to deal with.” One of the heavy components of the bombs had been their steel casings. They were not a design-critical element but would have been cumbersome to steal, so they were constructed by a metal fabricator in Kerman. “So,” Khalib continued, “my bomb will have to remain disassembled if the animals are to carry it. We will have to complete the assembly when we are close to our objective. Travel in Afghanistan is very dangerous if you are in a vehicle. A few men with a string of animals are commonplace and not so interesting to the Americans.”

  “So it is Abramin you want to take along?”

  “Yes. He is the better technician. Since I will have the uranium weapon, it must function properly. Perhaps it would have been better had we been able to acquire two plutonium bombs.”

  Mugniyah nodded. “Perhaps. But I am given to understand that the uranium bomb is of a more proven design.”

  Both men were terrorists. They knew the plutonium bomb could be a dangerous weapon even if the conventional explosives failed to achieve a high-order nuclear detonation. Highly enriched uranium was deadly as well, if not on quite the same scale as plutonium. The scattering of radioactive material, as the Iraqis had found out in Kurdistan, was of limited use in an open, sparsely populated area, but in an urban environment, the “dirty bomb” could create serious long-term medical problems for those exposed and render sizable portions of a city unusable for years. So Khalib would take the uranium bomb to the plains of Afghanistan, where there were few inhabitants but for the American pipeline crews. Pavel Zelinkow had given Mugniyah other instructions for the plutonium bomb.

  “It is good that there are two bombs, two targets, and two of us to deliver them.” Khalib assumed that there was a second target. If he resented the fact that Mugniyah did not share with him the target of the second weapon, he did not show it. He was a professional terrorist and was not offended by information denied him for matters of security.

  “When you have completed your mission, Khalib Beniid, where will you go?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps Kabul, for if we are successful, th
e city will surely be a welcome place for Islamic fighters. Perhaps Osama, if he is able, will come from hiding and return to the capital. But I have learned to never underestimate the Americans. It may be that I will remain a fugitive in the mountains, sometimes in Afghanistan, sometimes in Pakistan. Or perhaps the names of these countries or the lines drawn between them by Mountbatten, or some other British lord, will no longer be a distinction.”

  Mugniyah studied this wily mountain fighter. He was one of the few non-Arab native Afghans who had fought with al Qaeda. He was one of the few who was, in every sense of the word, a patriot. Khalib had fought the Russians, the Northern Alliance, and then the Americans. But would any of those who had been raised in that harsh land ever be able to put away their guns? What was there for them? Khalib would, Mugniyah sensed, continue with the struggle. If it ended, he would find a new one. Mugniyah almost envied him, to fight for the sake of fighting. And if one ever settled down, there would always be someone who felt he was more deserving of the worthless piece of dirt on which you lived than you were. So you could then fight over the worthless piece of dirt. That was Afghanistan and the Afghans.

  As for bin Laden, Mugniyah was not so sure that Khalib was speaking about the man or the myth. Khalib had been among the inner circle of the Taliban and close to the al Qaeda leader. If anyone were to know whether bin Laden were truly alive, he would. Yet, while he spoke of the tall Saudi sheik in reverent tones, there was a hint of sarcasm in his voice—or was there? Mugniyah had been at the game long enough to usually know when a man was lying and when he wasn’t. But he had also been around long enough to know when it didn’t matter.

  “And you, Abu Dokhan, what will you do when you have taken your bomb to its proper place?” Khalib asked this evenly and with no emotion in his voice.

  “I will return to Lebanon and the struggle there. What we do here will have an impact in the Middle East, but who knows in what way? Here you will only have to deal with the Americans. There, I will have to deal with the Americans and the Israelis.”

  Khalib spat but held his gaze. “Are they not the same?”

  “Not entirely, my friend. How soon will you leave?”

  “Perhaps a week. The scientists have some modifications to make to the bombs. And yourself, Dokhan?”

  “Not long after you.”

  Tuesday, 24 December,

  the Big Island, Hawaii

  Steven Fagan was hurrying to finish in the office so he could get down the mountain to see Lon, and get some sleep. It was, after all, Christmas Eve, yet he did feel a touch of guilt that he would be the only one who spent Christmas with his family. Well, almost the only one. Janet Brisco’s son was flying into Waimea tomorrow, and she would be able to have dinner with him—unless something broke. He had not slept the night before and had only managed a short nap on the flights from Kona to Nellis. There had been too much to think about on the flight back and much to do once they arrived. After his call to his banking contacts, he reviewed each request for imagery and analysis they had sent along to Jim Watson at Langley. It was frighteningly similar to what he had done when he was a case officer—back when he was on the “inside.” Yet he could see this was far more secure than sending his message traffic through the embassy code clerks and communicators. Fagan could only guess how Watson was set up on the other end, perhaps just himself. Most likely, Watson could personally take the information requests and redirect them from his office to the imagery and analysis teams. The data Watson received back could be encoded and transmitted from his office in Langley back to Fagan on the Big Island. The notion that the resources of the entire intelligence community could be made available to him with only two or three people at the CIA in the loop was well beyond Steven’s experience only a few years ago.

  “Got a minute, boss?”

  “Sure, Garrett. C’mon in.”

  Garrett had a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand and two shot glasses in the other. “How about it, Steven? A drop of holiday cactus juice for the road.”

  Steven hesitated, then smiled and accepted one of the glasses. Garrett splashed some of the amber liquid in Fagan’s glass, then charged his own.

  “Here’s to the lads,” Garrett offered.

  “The lads,” Steven replied, and they both sipped at their drinks. “How’re things on your end?” he continued. “You ready to go?”

  “We’ve done about all we can,” Garrett said as he slid into a chair opposite Steven’s desk, “until we can put a finer point on exactly where we may be going. I have only two Farsi speakers and four who can probably make themselves understood in Pashtun. Three, including Bijay, speak Arabic, but it’s modern standard Arabic, and that’s a limiting factor. We can go in as a mining survey crew, Iranian regular army, or as irregular mountain fighters. Unless we can find them in Iran and get near them on the ground, it’s going to be hard. My guess is they will be in vehicles while in Iran, but once they get across the border and into the mountains, there are any number of ways they could travel. We could be in the mountain passes searching pack animals.”

  Steven nodded. He had been a Special Forces trooper in his day. There was a certain excitement about preparing men for possible combat and the prospect of a ground action. He was a “staffie” now, a controller and part of the support cadre. Still, he knew and envied the camaraderie only found in the barracks with the men.

  “We’ve asked Langley for every kind of coverage and electronic analysis imaginable for central Iran. At our urging, they’ve asked to put up a Global Star drone in Iranian airspace, but that’s a national security issue. It’ll also depend on whether it can be done without tipping our hand. If you have to take a team in there, we don’t want to give them any advance warning. In that regard, the buildup for a possible ground action in Iraq may serve as a smoke screen.”

  Garrett nodded. “A lot’s changed in the last twenty-four hours. What do you think, Steven? Are we going in the right direction with this?”

  It was a complex question, and Steven turned it over carefully in his mind before answering. “I believe so. There are a lot of agencies out there looking for terrorists and illegal drugs. Our cover was pretty solid, but a good investigator could have made us and caused problems. Now that the FBI will be in on the deal, they can probably head off any official inquiries. Somewhere along the line, an official connection had to be made. The fact that an operation may be close on the heels of that connection may not be totally in our favor. I would have liked to have run some comm drills with them on a tactical level before we had to do it for real.”

  Garrett shrugged. “We got LeMaster, and LeMaster will always be able to talk to us. They will just have to talk to him.”

  “I suppose,” Steven replied. “But it’s nice to have that real-time download from the source or the platform. And that usually takes some practice. We’ll see.” He knocked back the last of his tequila. “I need to get some sleep; you look like you could use some yourself. I’ll be at home. Call me if anything comes up.” Steven followed Garrett out of the office. Steven headed for his jeep and swung inside. It was an island rig with a roll cage and a Bimini top.

  “Garrett, one more thing.” Garrett turned. “There is a liaison officer from the Bureau that’s been read into the project and will be the official link between us and the government. I got a heads-up that he will be here day after tomorrow. I should have a name and contact instructions before he arrives.” Steven started the jeep. “And hey—”

  “Hey what?”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Garrett smiled and headed for the operations building. The mission planners would be working in shifts around the clock now. No holiday for them. They would do that until the IFOR was tasked with the mission, or some military special operations unit was sent in. Garrett could close his eyes and see a map of southeastern Iran, Pakistan, and western Afghanistan. Where are those guys? He thought about seeking out Janet Brisco for a nightcap, but thought better of it. The last thing he wan
ted to do was trade shots with that lady. He was tired, and sleep was the logical and best course of action. He could be called at any time to mount out, and then there would be little or no time for sleep.

  6

  Friday, December 27,

  the Big Island, Hawaii

  Janet Brisco sat at her desk, studying the latest satellite coverage from central Iran and the routes leading to the border reaches of Afghanistan. She had put her son on the plane late Christmas Day and had been at her desk ever since. There was now a pile of cigarettes in the ashtray on the desk and several empty coffee cups. She still didn’t know for sure, but she was developing rough idea of where the bombs were. Once she could confirm it, they could do some serious planning. There was a gentle rapping on the door.

  “Come!” she yelled, using the interruption to absentmindedly light yet another cigarette. Steven had installed exhaust fans in the ceiling over her desk that quietly removed the smoke from her corner of the operations building. Her eyes never left the scope as she scrolled from hut to hut in yet another village near Kerman. So intense was her concentration that she failed to notice the Gurkha who appeared at her elbow.

  “I thought you might like a cup of tea, miss.”

  She wheeled on him, then her expression immediately softened.

  “Why, thank you, Prakash. That is very nice of you. Can you stay and visit for a few minutes?”

  “Thank you, miss, but please, I must return to my duties. We must continue to prepare.”

  “Another time then. Thank you for the tea.”

  “Yes, another time. And you are most welcome, miss.”

  He bowed over steepled fingers and backed away from the desk toward the door. Brisco smiled after him. Owens and LeMaster exchanged knowing glances, but said nothing. A Gurkha might interrupt Brisco or even take a few minutes of her time, but that privilege did not extend to them. Since she, Garrett, and Steven had last returned to the island, she had done nothing but work, plan, fume, bark orders, and make demands. She drafted e-mails, made phone calls, checked and double-checked equipment and information, and spent hour upon hour on the photographic table going over satellite imagery. At any time, day or night, she could be found hunched over her stereoscope, comparing the current satellite pass to the previous one. And she never slept. Owens and LeMaster both lived in fear of incurring her wrath. Steven treated her like a lioness with cubs, while Garrett avoided her altogether. She was nasty and mean to all who came near her, save for the Gurkhas.