Anticipation gave way to disbelief. Merk knew what those words meant—a dirty bomb or some sort of hot material, chemical, chlorine, radioactive, or biological, was on the move in war-torn Syria. There were few assets on the ground to stop it.
What the hell? Did the CIA confirm this? he wondered, keeping the news from Nico. Merk recalled Iran’s attempt to plant sea-mines in the Strait of Hormuz and then the images of the CIA strike on the terrorist safe house in Jaar, Yemen, on the same night, within the same hour. Something wasn’t right and he finally made the connection. Whoever gave the false intel to CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert was also sponsored by Iran. It was the diversion of luring three CIA drones away from the Persian Gulf that night to fly over Yemen airspace that told Merk that the propaganda tsunami of striking a school and the mining of the Strait of Hormuz were coordinated at least a month in advance.
But who was the mastermind behind those dual, seemingly unrelated events?
Chapter Twenty-Four
ALONG THE IRAQ border, north of the Syrian town of Abu Kamal on the Euphrates River, stretched a chain of burnt-out forts and outposts that lay in ruins from the ISIS offensive in the spring of 2014. With the help of Iranian air power and battalions, by agreement with the Syrian government, a 100-mile stretch of desert had been carved out, driving the ISIS forces farther north into Syria and across Iraq, then down along the reinforced border with Saudi Arabia.
Strengthened with US military backing and Russian sorties, the Kurdish army with thousands of Iraqis cleared out a similar terrorist haven of ISIS fighters on their side of the border. That left a joint venture between US Special Forces advisors and the Iraqi police task force to monitor the refugees and insurgents flowing over the broken border crossings.
During the day, Iranian gunships, drones, and spy planes watched from the sky, while ground patrols branched out, scouting along the border and following the corridor for ISIS warriors, suppliers, smugglers of cigarettes and kerosene, exiled Baath Party commanders once loyal to Saddam Hussein, deserted Syrian soldiers, Syrian rebel factions, and al Qaeda groups and offshoots that wanted to attack the West and the United States.
The US countered that activity at night with high-tech hardware, from infrared cameras able to detect the heat signatures of rodents on the ground, to Long-Range Acquisition System (LRAS) night-vision scopes capable of picking up humans several klicks away on dark moonless nights. Beyond degrading the Islamic State, Iraq deployed more of their policemen and army guards at Fort 24 than at any other border crossing along Syria. It was an attempt to stop the influx of suicide bombers, al Qaeda bomb-makers, ISIS fighters, and former Hussein loyalists from destabilizing the fractured government in Iraq any further, whether north fighting ISIS over Mosul, or in the villages on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Across the border from Fort 24 in Syria’s northeast desert, a flat, arid plateau with a ridge of berms rising low to the east along Iraq, a group of Syrian Army generals met with a pair of North Korean engineers and a middle-aged Iranian nuclear scientist named Ferdows.
Among the leaders in the group stood Syrian four-star General Adad, a rotund, bombastic man with graying hair and sun-leather face. Adad ran through a list of items on a marked-up blueprint. Loving to hear himself talk, the general surveyed a swale to the south and pointed to planned locations for a missile launch, a supply house, a couple of false buildings, and a control center. He pointed to a road in the distance, fingering where a connector road would be constructed that ran across the sand in a figure eight driveway, as shown on the plan, that would encompass the site. With the wave of his hand, he boasted about how the site layout was his idea, even though the plan was cloned from an existing base in North Korea, first, then Iran.
As Adad spoke, flanked by a trio of Syrian guards armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, a translator listened to and verbalized his words into Korean so the visitors would understand the general’s remarks. Since Ferdows was fluent in English, French, his native Persian of Farsi, and Arabic, Syria’s official language, no translation was needed for the Iranian scientist.
The balding, bespectacled Ferdows listened intently, taking in elements of the design piece by piece, jotting them down in a tablet design app. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and squinted southwest, where he visualized Israel standing on the other side of Jordan. The idea to build a North Korean long-range missile launcher in eastern Syria, like similar facilities erected in Iran, armed with Iranian nuclear-tipped rockets, brought a grin of satisfaction to his face. Syria couldn’t let the rebels or ISIS insurgents overthrow the general’s government. They had to be kept out of the eastern desert border. To ensure that level of containment, General Adad blew up a dam, destroyed access roads and infrastructure to water, in effect cutting off supplies to the Caliph and his army of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant (ISIL). ISIS’s primary goal was to liquidate Shia Muslims in Iraq and Syria, the Putin-backed Syrian regime, the Kurds to the north, and Iran emboldened by the US nuclear treaty. That threat was still real and not going away. General Adad understood that better than most; he also knew cutting off fuel and water were key to keeping the Islamic State’s power contained in the north, along the border with Turkey.
The North Koreans listened to the general. The old Korean man was a frail ballistics engineer, while his female colleague, Kim Dong-Sun, was a missile specialist. The Korean pair checked the contours of the land and the locations where each component would support and supply the missile battery.
Dong-Sun was a petite colonel devoid of emotion. She wrapped her long hair in a bun and tucked it under a cap, which accentuated her angular, stone face, plain without makeup, and that afternoon coated with sand dust. Her narrow, Siamese cat-like eyes, black, shifting, took in the desolate landscape. Whenever she glanced at the fat, portly body of General Adad, which was alien to her countrymen’s smallish, thinner figures, she cringed.
Dong-Sun looked over the shoulder of General Adad, seeing the plans with hand-written notes in Sanskrit for the first time since they were emailed to the Syrian military from North Korea’s Physics Department of Kanggye Defense College a month ago. The Syrian engineers had done a decent job of plotting what she designed. The only item she saw missing were the Chinese solar panels she engineered that would provide backup power in case the underground cables, which ran from the mountain valleys of the west at the earthen Tabqa hydroelectric dam to the nearby border with Iraq, were severed by the civil conflict or damaged by sabotage.
Dong-Sun was about to broach the subject when out of the corner of her eye she spotted apparitions drifting in the heat haze along the Syrian side of the berms by the Iraqi border. She had been silent for the better part of the hour-long briefing. She knew her place in the misogynist Syrian world was to stand resolutely still, hover in the background, be silent, be gracious, stay out of sight, speak when spoken to—she was used to the same boorish treatment back home in the male-dominated Asian societies of China and the Korean peninsula.
The engineer watched the visitors float across the melting sand. Silently, steadily they strode over the watery mirage. For a moment she was transfixed by the optical illusion, by the way their legs wriggled in the heat waves, by the way their lower bodies melted in the undulating mirror of sand. With a tap on the wrist, she interrupted the translator, pointing to the visitors. Redirected by the unwelcome party, he stopped translating.
General Adad didn’t hear the chatter of the translator. So he glanced at him and followed his sightline over to the intruders. As the Syrians turned east, adjusting their eyes to the heat rising from the desert, the foursome came into view: Armed Syrian soldiers escorted a white male and female couple, in their twenties, dressed in khakis and tee shirts, looking American.
Dressed in an olive green North Korean officer’s uniform, pants, and a tunic with blue liner, big buttons, and starch-stiff lapels, Dong-Sun opened a flap on her utility belt, pulled out a pair of binoc
ulars, and zoomed in on the couple. The man was sturdy with a robust frame, had curly brown hair and a beard. The woman was tall and thin, her straight blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Both were covered in dust. The armed guards carried many cameras slung over their shoulders.
“Western maggots. They smell like American journalists,” Dong-Sun said in Korean. The translator stared at her. She shot a stare back, prodding him to translate her observation. He did so reluctantly. She looked at the tablet that Ferdows stowed under his jacket.
The guards stepped in front of General Adad in a defensive posture that both bewildered and amazed her. They spread their legs apart, stiffened their wide frames in an open stance, and lifted the AK-47s chest-high without lowering their heads to eye the rifles’ scopes. Taken back by their unorthodox stance, by the fat targets they made of their bodies, Dong-Sun handed the binoculars to her colleague and moved Ferdows aside. She studied the poor aim and terrible posture the Syrian marksmen made in taking a stance against the threat.
The engineer shook her head, took out a lemon from the utility belt and, with a paring knife, cut the fruit in half. With a swipe she peeled the rind back and cut the halves into quarters. She bit into the lemon, sucking on the sour juices, watching the guards’ tense shoulders, at their once-relaxed demeanor stiffened into frowns. Dong-Sun spat out a seed and the chewed quarter before spitting out the rind, then inserted the next lemon slice into her mouth.
In watching her drain the juices out of the lemon, Ferdows made a sour face. He and his countrymen recoiled at the uncouth Korean.
“Look at them. They are backpack reporters,” she said in Korean. “American debt is so big, TV news can’t pay production crew wages.” She noticed their hawklike stares, spat out the next lemon quarter and, using her hands to hold an imaginary firehose between her legs, she shouted at the Syrian guards in Korean: “You stand like fat elephants, holding your guns like trunks. Are you fat and slow like elephants?”
Not understanding a single word she said, the guards glanced over to the fiery Korean colonel, while trying to keep an eye on the captives. Kim directed the translator to translate what she said. He winced and shook his head pleading not to. “Translate,” she shrieked. He started to translate her words and the generals looked back at her in shock as she crudely dressed down Adad’s guards.
Fed up with all the masculine eyes glaring at her, as if she were the one who held the Kalashnikovs like a limp garden hose, Dong-Sun motioned General Adad that she would demonstrate for his guards how they should stand and aim the rifles. Curious to see what she would do next, Adad motioned the nearest guard. The soldier looked at the general in dismay.
Kim Dong-Sun stepped over, tapped the guard’s elbow, lifted the rifle to his shoulder, sat it on his meaty upper arm, and tilted his head down. She tried to angle his big frame sideways, but he refused to budge. So she stepped behind him, looked at his large butt, and remarked, “Do all Syrian cows have fat tails?”
The translator was appalled. But Dong-Sun didn’t wait for him to speak. She kicked the guard in the back of his leg, forcing him down on one knee. She pulled his shoulder back and yanked his torso sideways. His stance and aim were still poor, out of line. So she snatched the rifle from the other guard, shouting, “Watch. Learn.”
With deliberate, robotic movements, Dong-Sun stood sideways, sucked in her gut as if she had the fat man’s belly, saying, “Make your body thin, like blade of grass.” She dropped to one knee, put the rifle on her shoulder, pressed the stock snug to her cheekbone, eyed the sight at the tip of the rifle, aimed it at an imaginary target in front of the captives, and then fired a shot that blew a spray of sand at the boots of the captive bearded man.
He flinched, wiping grains of sand dust off his beard and out of his eyes. The woman stopped to help him, but the border guard yanked her away, goading her on without her colleague. The other border guard swore in Arabic, wondering what the errant shot was all about.
General Adad, together with his generals, waved their hands, shouting that it was okay, that the crazy Korean engineer was a woman learning how to shoot.
Without knowing what he said, Dong-Sun stood up, ignored the bellowing men, handed the rifle back to the other guard, and then circled around the kneeling one, squeezed his shoulder, and straightened his aim. “Go, now. Fire,” she yelled. But he didn’t shoot. “Fire. All clear,” she repeated. Still, he hesitated. So she tapped his elbow; he recoiled a shot over the heads of the captives, who ducked alongside the now-angry border guards.
The kneeling guard threw the assault rifle on the ground in frustration. She picked it up, stood sideways, reed-thin, and walked the guard through the steps from holding her form to steadying the rifle, and aimed the sight beyond the target.
The brooding General Adad watched the engineer with dark amusement.
* * *
THE SWIRL OF speculation blew up like desert sand in the tense Sixth Floor Ops Center. The CIA director and his team viewed the covert meeting between Syrian and North Korean scientists. The satellite image showed the minutest of details, from the time on General Adad’s black Movado watch to the chevron stripes on Colonel Kim Dong-Sun’s army uniform.
“There they are—” the CIA director shouted, unable to contain his anxiousness over the operation going south. He pointed to the border guards goading the CIA agents, dressed as journalists, to the Syrian generals. “Looks like world heritage day, minus the UN blue helmets and ISIS desert fighters,” he remarked. He took a breath, adding, “We have Koreans, Syrians, Americans … Hell, we probably have an Iranian nuke engineer planted somewhere in there.”
At 0400 zulu, the thumb-tapping CIA director stood with his team of intel specialists and directors. His fatigued, bleary-eyed minions had worked overtime late into the next day, driven by fear that the hot Syrian dirty material would find a way to be shipped out of the war-ravaged country, despite the CIA and Pentagon retasking more than a dozen drones to scour the Syrian borders and battlefields to pick up the infrared trail of plutonium, uranium, or some type of gas agent.
The team had been driven into the ground, analyzing the swatches of electronic NSA-eavesdropped files, and CIA back channel HUMINT with file after file on suspected militants and Islamic State terrorists devouring the bulk of their time and resources. The Syria-Iran-Yemen AQAP connections dominated the new Red Cell analysis. But the CIA director had a sinking feeling that the hot load was headed to or had already made it across the border. If that were the case, then there would be little hope to intercept it until it reached its target destination.
“What’s she doing?” the deputy director of operations asked.
Dong-Sun took the rifle from the guard, demonstrated how to control breathing to calm the body, release tension, and relax the brain’s alpha waves, while focusing her mind on the singular task at hand. In a standing position, she aimed the rifle and fired a volley that clipped one of the cameras dangling by the Syrian border guard’s side. With a burst of the lens, the agents hit the ground covering their heads; the guard jumped back shaking.
“Jesus Christ, that was close. Is she training Adad’s men how to shoot?” the CIA director yelled, the artery in his neck rippling. Mad as hell, he turned to Red Cell analysts: “Did one of you damn ants find anything on Ms. North Korea being an expert marksman?” The analysts froze. They didn’t utter a word; another pair stared down at the table. “Hell, Ms. North Korea is a rifle specialist first, and a missile engineer second, and we don’t know this? That’s nuts.”
As the SAD director flipped through the pages of Dong-Sun’s dossier, the director of clandestine services stepped over to the CIA director and whispered in his ear. With his index finger, the CIA director motioned to contact the Signal Command at Fort Meade to arm the Hellfire missile on the drone hovering over the Syrian desert. All hell was about to break loose.
Chapter Twenty-Five
FURIOUS BY THE brazen shot, General Adad leaned into Dong-Sun’s face swearing in Ara
bic. She handed the AK-47 back to the guard and covered her mouth and nose from the odor of the general’s bad breath. He could have used her lemon to cleanse his palette. He blinked more rapidly as his voice and blood pressure rose. Wary that his temper was about to erupt, she eyed the border guards pulling the Americans to their feet and pushing them onward.
Ferdows took the blueprints from General Adad’s hand, as the border guard with the confiscated cameras signaled the Americans to stay put. He strode quickly, glancing back at the hostages. Dong-Sun watched the bearded American pull a small object, like a pen, out of his shirtsleeve. Sensing danger, she stepped behind Ferdows and General Adad to use them as human shields. She didn’t want to die in war-torn Syria.
With a click of the pen a starburst grenade, hidden inside a camera, exploded in a percussion blast, instantly killing the Syrian soldier. The shock wave radiated out, knocking over the generals, Adad and Ferdows, back on top of diminutive Dong-Sun. The generals, closest to the border guard’s motionless body, writhed in pain, covering their ears as blood seeped out.
The CIA agents yanked the other border guard to the ground, wresting the AK-47 and pistol from him. The female agent turned around and fired the pistol, shooting General Adad’s bodyguards. The bearded agent stabbed the border guard in the ribs, driving the blade into his ribs until his eyes flared open in shock, while his will to fight slackened.
Taking a page out of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda playbook—when he dispatched a pair of assassins dressed as journalists to blow up the Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the 9/11 attacks—Alan Cuthbert and his fellow CIA operator moved in to secure the site.
A jeep rumbled up the road in a cloud of dust, cut across the flats toward them where the connector road had been designed. The female agent picked up the plans, while Agent Cuthbert pulled a quivering Ferdows off of Dong-Sun. With the cap blown off her head and her long hair disheveled, draping her stunned face, Cuthbert lifted the engineer to her feet as the jeep skidded to a halt. Waiting to see who was in the vehicle, the female agent frisked Dong-Sun’s backside. The agent felt the outline of a pistol tucked down the belt of her narrow waist, and pulled out a Browning automatic.
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