Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  Adjo gave the memory sticks containing the audio and video data to a staff sergeant who loaded them into the computer just as Task Force 777 commander Lt. Gen. Adom Kaphiri Samra arrived. He had dark eyes, a trim moustache, and a crisp uniform that was nonetheless sweat-stained under the arms. He had been working hard. He had been worrying hard.

  The men stood and saluted. Samra motioned for them to sit. “What did you find out?” the officer asked eagerly.

  “Sir, we should talk after you see the data,” Adjo said.

  Samra frowned. “Is a picture worth so much or is your data worth so little?”

  “Both, sir.”

  Samra continued to frown—directly at Adjo now— as he motioned for the sergeant to run the recordings. Adjo had spent the three-hour return flight trying to figure out exactly what to say to his superior. That wasn’t it. Yet Samra—who was a fierce nationalist—would probably like the next part even less.

  Adjo and Massari had bookmarked sections where figures were active and noteworthy events transpired. That was roughly five minutes of merged video and audio. After watching the section with the serpent four times—which was the bulk of the recording—the commander rose so that he could see the men. His expression had gone from displeased to puzzled. It matched that of Adjo.

  “I see what appears to be a stick becoming a snake and then a stick again,” the officer said.

  “That is what appears to be happening,” Adjo agreed.

  “What did your eyes tell you?” he asked.

  Adjo was silent.

  “Sir,” Massari said, “I was watching the cave without night-vision glasses and I saw nothing but the lanterns and their immediate vicinity.”

  The dark eyes of the senior officer shifted slowly from the acoustic engineer back to Adjo. “You heard nothing?”

  “Only the wind, sir.”

  Samra steepled his fingers on the table and leaned forward.

  “I had men on the scene who saw and heard very little,” he said. “Yet people who were not there know much.”

  “Sir?” Adjo said.

  “Between last night and my coming here, Internet discussion of this man has quadrupled,” Samra said. “In just the last hour, visa applications from our sister countries have increased”—he tapped the keyboard and looked at the monitor—“sevenfold. We can slow the processing of these applications, but that will not stop many from crossing the borders illegally. Either they know something we do not—which, I needn’t point out, would be rather an embarrassment as this is an intelligence division—or they are being misled. Either this man we were not quite observing is the prophet Moses returned or he is not. So. What do I tell the commander in chief? What does he tell the supreme commander?”

  The four men were uncomfortably silent.

  “Should we infiltrate the cave with the next wave of pilgrims, who are bound to arrive presently?” Samra asked with growing impatience.

  “I am not sure that would produce useful results,” Adjo offered.

  “Why is that, Lieutenant?”

  “If this man is not the Gharib Qawee, no one will believe us,” Adjo said. “Besides, an effective disinformation program would take days if not weeks to mount. Conversely, proving that to be so would accomplish nothing. We would still have the problem of what to do with him and the crowds he is bound to attract.”

  “Do you have a constructive next-step offer?”

  “Perhaps,” Adjo said. “I read the daily intelligence packet on the ride back. It contained an interview with the English professor Wesley, who first observed this phenomenon last week. Did you see it, sir?”

  “I have not yet read the transcription,” Samra told him. “Perhaps you can summarize it?”

  “Sir, he referred to this as a ‘throwback’ to ancient days, when what he described as ‘a movement through the grasses’ elevated remote desert and mountain hermits to the level of holy teachers and mahdis.”

  “This ‘movement through the grasses,’ ” Samra asked. “What does that mean exactly? Like a snake?”

  “No, sir. It means a force, like a wind stirring the land,” Adjo replied.

  Therein the problem with all religious translations; the true and crucial meaning is in the subtleties. “So it’s more like a wildfire?”

  “That is a fair translation, yes, sir. In this case, since the fire already exists, the question is how do we douse it?”

  “Can we evict him as a religious agitator?” Massari asked.

  “That might cause the flame to grow brighter,” Adjo suggested.

  “And if this is real, we must be careful,” said the radio operator, who seemed anxious. “I mean, sir, it was real once in history. Could it not be again?”

  “I don’t believe that,” Samra said. “I won’t.”

  “If this man is real, we probably won’t succeed in stopping him any better than we did the last time,” Massari said.

  Samra shot him an angry look.

  “I still say it doesn’t matter,” Adjo insisted. “Even if we were to capture this man and his magic rod, he could say that his is the only hand that can make it work and he can decline to do so. Even if he is a false prophet, the believers will continue to believe.”

  “We don’t even know who he is or what he looks like,” Samra pointed out. “I wonder if he was hiding from you or from his own people.”

  “Why hide from his own people?” Massari asked.

  “The unseen is more powerful than that which is in the open,” Samra told him.

  “Which is what I was leading up to,” Adjo said. “If we can get a look at him, perhaps we can trace his movements back to where this started. We might be able to attach him to a cabal of some kind. Perhaps some foreign military. That might undermine his credibility with the common people.”

  “I’m not sure such a connection exists,” Samra said. “Before you arrived I was reviewing images taken over the past week by the GRU’s Bliska-3 satellite.”

  The GRU—Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the KGB’s rival and survivor—was Russia’s General Intelligence Directorate. The Kremlin had a mutual support pact with Egypt that gave Cairo access to Middle East satellite data and Moscow the use of Egyptian airspace for sorties to protect tankers entering the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

  “I wanted to try and determine if we were dealing with an individual or a group,” Samra said. “There do not seem to be any unusual patterns of group traffic. Image-comparison software suggests that every tourist who went up the mountain as part of a group came down as a group. I examined bus records. No missing persons were reported. My presumption is that an individual arrived, perhaps on foot or by taxi, went up at night to prevent being spotted from above, and began his ministry.”

  “How, sir?” Adjo asked. “Did he simply start throwing down his stick to the ground and wait for people to notice?”

  “Why not?” Samra asked. “Prophets don’t think the way we do.”

  “You just told us the Englishman likened this to the way prophets made names for themselves in ancient times,” Massari asked. “This would fit well with that idea.”

  Adjo nodded but he didn’t buy it.

  “Lieutenant, I agree that we must investigate every angle,” Samra told him. “But we mustn’t simply assume there is a conspiracy. If we are facing one crazy or ambitious individual, that would be better than having to deal with a larger, well-organized plot. It would certainly inform our tactics going forward.”

  Massari shrugged. “The man could just disappear from his cave one night.”

  “Sir, I would prefer if your scenario were correct,” Adjo said to the lieutenant general. “But I can’t believe the video crew just happened to be there when a pilgrim who happened to see someone who said he was the prophet just happened to come down the mountain.”

  “They were at that site for fifteen hours,” Samra pointed out. “To see one man in that time is hardly a miracle. I’m not saying this so-called prophet may no
t have accomplices, which is why I want you to go there, Lieutenant. See what you can discover, find out whether this is the work of God or men.”

  “Yes, sir,” Adjo said. He was still chewing on what Samra had said. It wasn’t going down. “And what then? Time may not be on our side.”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Samra admitted. He watched the recording again. “I’m going to send this out to allied intelligence services and see what they make of it, what they suggest.”

  From where he was sitting, Adjo could see the screen. The image was green, grainy, inconclusive. Adjo the military officer wanted to know what was happening out there. He wanted to keep his country safe. But Adjo the man wanted to know as well. He was not a Muslim of great faith and yet something had touched him out there. He wanted to make sure it was the mountain, perhaps the shadow of history, and not the man they were investigating.

  The lieutenant general removed the memory stick and put it in his shirt pocket. He faced his men and they stood.

  “We’ll have this computer-enhanced, but I doubt it will tell us much,” he said. “You know, I’m informed that the priests of the pharaoh were able to duplicate this miracle using simple catches and releases set inside a painted tree branch.”

  “I myself have seen street corner magicians perform similar tricks, causing canes to sag and stiffen,” Massari remarked. “The transformation itself means nothing.”

  “To us,” Adjo said.

  “You’re right,” Samra told him. “And I hope to keep it that way.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” the radio operator asked.

  Samra turned to go and the team saluted.

  “I mean I truly hope this man is a fake,” the commander replied as he left the room. “I’ve had boils and I don’t like them.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FORT JACKSON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  It was Major Dell’s dream that one day she would have an orderly. That had not yet happened. Here, though—unlike Iraq—she had a buzzer. When someone came to the door, she didn’t have to shout.

  She expected the callers and let them in. Ryan Kealey was tall, in his forties, and dressed in civilian clothes. General Emory Farrell was a head shorter, some ten years older, and barrel-chested. The officer shut the door behind them.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Kealey said, shaking her hand after she’d saluted the general.

  “Your call intrigued me.”

  “Plus, I ordered her,” Farrell said. He didn’t sit but stood fidgeting anxiously as he gestured for the others to be seated. Only Major Dell did.

  “So?” Kealey asked her. “How about the major?”

  “He’s all right,” she said.

  “Define ‘all right,’ ” Kealey said. “And be specific. Please.” He was impatient. He wanted answers, not the usual bureaucratic dance.

  “The major is feeling a little lost, a little alienated, a little claustrophobic—”

  “The first two I got. Would you care to explain that last one?” Kealey urged.

  She sat back. “Major Phair is being choked by the support system he needs here—”

  “Here as in ‘Fort Jackson’ or as in ‘the United States’?”

  “Both.”

  “How does that manifest itself?” Kealey asked.

  “General restlessness,” she replied. “He’s been used to free-ranging, not sitting. He wants to be somewhere else without making a complete break, so having both feet in one place upsets him.”

  “A straddler? Indecisive?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “He’s more like a kite. One that wants a long string and just as much tail as is required for stability.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Farrell asked.

  “Which is why your call interested me,” she went on, ignoring the other officer.

  “I didn’t really tell you anything,” Kealey said.

  “You’re with the CIA and you’re asking about a cleric who spent well over a decade in the streets of Iraq,” she said. “You have an operation that requires his skills, his experiences. It doesn’t take a profiler to figure out that one.”

  “Maybe you should hire her,” Farrell snorted.

  “Maybe I will,” Kealey said. He smiled, a little too disarmingly to be sincere. He used it like a surgeon’s knife. “I have to know, yes or no: can we rely on him?”

  “That depends.”

  “That’s not yes or no.”

  “Do you want him abroad? Working domestically? Using his mind, his body, his faith? I can give you a yes or no to each of those, but there are a lot of combinations and variables.”

  “That’s fair,” Kealey replied. “Has he gone over?”

  “No,” she said. “He has not.”

  “But he’s been living among Americans,” Kealey said. “What happens if we send him back?”

  “He’ll no longer be living among Americans, sir,” she replied.

  The general smiled sweetly. “Until there’s a drawdown, I’m not so sure of that.”

  “Touché,” she said, embarrassed to have misstepped in front of Kealey. She moved on quickly. “Sirs, I’ve been looking for lingering psychological tripwires. I haven’t found any.”

  “Do we know if he ever left Iraq during his time there?” Kealey asked.

  “He says he didn’t, and there are no fingerprints of Iraqi IAM,” she replied.

  “IAM?” Farrell asked.

  “Input And Manipulation.”

  “She means ‘brainwashing,’ ” Kealey said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What would those fingerprints be?” Farrell inquired.

  “You can’t remake the brain without psychological scarring,” she said. “We’ve been studying subjects who have been held in Iran, for example, for five or more years and pulled out by special ops teams.”

  “Subjects?” Farrell asked.

  “Tourists, soldiers, people we’ve allowed to be kidnapped.”

  “Helluva commitment on their part,” Farrell said.

  “It’s the only way to do it,” Kealey told him.

  “Because the captives have been retrained by and spoken only with Iranian indoctrinators, they forget, and tend to trip over, colloquial phrases, both saying and comprehending them,” Dell said. “That’s because the psy-ops personnel in Iran were educated in English or American universities where they tended not to socialize with local students and did not pick up jargon.”

  “So the subjects are thrown by cadences and usage that jar with deeply planted overwrites,” Kealey said.

  “Repetitive overwrites,” Maj. Dell said. “The key to IAM is repetition in circumstances of sensory deprivation.”

  “That’s all they have to focus on,” Kealey added.

  “Right.”

  “I understand that Major Phair freaked out in a confessional,” Kealey said.

  His words were like thrown ice. “How do you know that?”

  “I stopped in the chapel on the way to see the general, told some of the kids I was an old army buddy looking to surprise him,” Kealey said. “They’re a little green, you know.”

  “I think we need a base-wide directive,” General Farrell said.

  “I did give Major Dell a chance to divulge that when she said he felt claustrophobic,” Kealey said.

  “That information was privileged,” she said.

  Kealey didn’t seem to care. His eyes remained on the major. “Would a man who was held, say, in a steel cage in somebody’s desert cellar flip out in a situation like that?”

  “He would display a wider range of anxieties,” the psychologist said sternly.

  “Beyond freaking out in a confessional,” Kealey said.

  “That’s right. He would be prone to express rage whenever he felt trapped, not just physically but emotionally. He would be uneasy in cafeteria lines, a standing automobile, an elevator.”

  “You’ve had no reports of that kind of behavior?” Kealey asked.

  “Major Phair was n
ot held in a cage and brainwashed,” Major Dell replied.

  General Farrell shook his head slowly. “You know, Mr. Kealey, I’m not sure whether my decision should address your needs or his. He sounds a little iffy. And before you plant the ‘national security’ flag, sending an incomplete man into the field doesn’t exactly help that cause, either.”

  “There will be a lot of eyes on him,” Kealey assured him.

  The general took a long breath and looked at Major Dell. “The part I would need you to sign off on is whether or not you think he’s a security risk.”

  “General, I’m sure you remember the incident with Col. Tina Meadow at Fort Bragg,” the psychologist replied. “She wasn’t a security risk until her mom was about to lose her house and someone offered Colonel Meadow a suitcase filled with hundred-dollar bills.”

  “You can always expect the unexpected,” the general said. “Our job right now is to consider the odds.”

  “Consider the situation,” Kealey urged patiently. “I need a cleric who speaks Arabic and knows the Iraqi people. I need someone who knows how to win their trust. The risk of inaction is worse than the slim chance we’re taking the wrong action.”

  “How do you define a ‘wrong action’?” Major Dell asked.

  “James Phair causes World War III,” Kealey said. “Short of that, he can’t do a worse job than we’re doing in the area of counter-theocratic operations. The jihad isn’t dying, we may be looking at the start of a new push within it, a new alliance, and I need someone who can help me reverse that.”

  The Stalin Maneuver, Major Dell thought. Five years ago, during her fourteen-week Army Medical Department training at Fort Sam Houston, one of the instructors warned the class about the inevitable clash between intuitive psychological care and checklist military procedure. “The worst part won’t be the disagreements,” Col. Naomi Griss had warned her, “but the fact that your patients are commodities. Just don’t succumb to the Stalin Maneuver, which the Russian dictator employed during World War II, which is to throw anyone and anything at a problem until something works. That cost him three million lives.”

  “At least let me talk to the man,” Kealey implored. It was the first time he’d made a request that didn’t sound like a demand.