The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “What if it’s just a house?”

  “Then why did somebody put five hundred gallons of diesel on a credit card? For the miles?”

  “Even if you’re right, we’re talking hundreds of square miles.”

  “Wherever it is, once we get close enough, anybody within a couple miles will know.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  Wells controlled his frustration. After the near disaster in Jamaica, Gaffan had the right to be gun-shy. “Think it through. Everybody’s everybody’s cousin here. You think they don’t notice if a bunch of Saudis come in? At least the neighbors would have called the paramilitaries, made sure it’s okay.”

  “So. Assuming your instinct is right, and they’re somewhere close, and the locals know where, how do we find them?”

  “We ask.”

  The gas station was a concrete shed with a tin roof and a plywood counter. A middle-aged man in a dirty red shirt sat by the register. He barely looked up as Wells entered. He was focused on the television blaring out a call-in advice show from Beirut. The Lebanese loved these shows. They loved to give one another advice.

  “Salaam aleikum.”

  “Aleikum salaam.”

  On screen, a woman in a head scarf and a pound of makeup listened to a man complain that his brother had borrowed his car, dented the bumper, and refused to fix it. “First of all… are you sure it wasn’t your wife who dented the bumper?” the woman said. The audience chortled.

  “Good show,” Wells said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Yes. I need another delivery. More diesel.”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “For the camp.”

  “What camp?”

  Wells couldn’t tell if the guy was hiding what he knew, had no idea what Wells was talking about, or was just slow. The third seemed likely. He couldn’t push too hard, risk rattling the guy, but he thought he could get away with one more try. “The one in the hills.”

  “You want it, come with your truck and pick it up. Like before.”

  “Of course. Like before.” He’d hoped to catch a break, trail a tanker truck to the camp, but that would have been too easy. Still, he had confirmed that the camp was somewhere close. Within ten miles, twenty at most.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jalal.” Wells had used the name for a decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By the end, he had known it as well as his own. Maybe better. “I’ll come back tomorrow. For the diesel.”

  “As you wish.” The man turned back to the show.

  WELLS RODE WEST, ONTO a road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. Over a rise, he stopped to make way for hundreds of sheep picking their way across the pavement. Two boys on donkeys and a single mangy collie herded the flock.

  The older boy, maybe ten, shouted, “Vroom, vroom,” and grinned and waved the stick he was using to prod the sheep along. He wore a tunic and a freshly laundered red-and-white kaffiyeh that contrasted sharply with his dark skin.

  Wells hopped off the bike. “What’s your name?”

  “Hamid,” the boy said shyly. The sheep marched around them, as slow and implacable as time itself.

  “I’m Jalal. These are your family’s sheep?”

  “My father’s.”

  “How many?”

  “Two hundred and eighty-one.” His pride was obvious.

  “That’s a lot of sheep.”

  “Next year we’ll have even more, my father says. Is that your motorcycle?”

  “I just bought it.”

  “Do you ride fast?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you ride in the dark?”

  “Yes. Do you study the Quran, Hamid?”

  “Of course.”

  “And are you Shia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know what Sunnis are?”

  “Muslim, but not like me.”

  “That’s right. I’m Sunni.”

  Hamid pinched his nose, apparently uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.

  “Do you know if there are other Sunnis around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where they live?”

  “That way.” Hamid pointed west with his stick, toward the mountains.

  “Do you know how far?”

  “Closer to the mountains. My father says to stay away from them. They make noise sometimes.” The last of the sheep had dribbled past them. Hamid kicked a donkey’s flank. The animal grumbled and trudged forward. “Good-bye, mister.”

  Wells waved good-bye. Gaffan pulled up, lowered his window. “What was that?”

  Wells explained. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Gaffan said.

  “Don’t you know by now that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good?”

  * * *

  THEY PASSED A ONE-LANE bridge over a dry streambed. Until now the land had been open and unfenced. Ahead, both sides of the road were fenced with strings of rusting wire that hung between wooden posts. Wells was a child again, on a road trip with his dad, east through Montana and Wyoming, on the way to Kansas City. His first bigleague baseball game. He was six.

  He rarely got to spend much time with his father, who spent most waking hours in the operating room at the hospital in Hamilton. More than once along the way, he’d told himself to remember, remember the diners where they ate and the gas stations where they stopped, as though he could make the trip last forever if he burned it deep enough into his brain. Of course, now the details had vanished. Wells remembered only being obscurely disappointed that his father didn’t seem more excited to be with him. But this landscape, so unexpected and so familiar, stirred an emotion stronger and purer than nostalgia.

  He slowed. Gaffan stopped beside him, ending his reverie. “See something?”

  “Nothing at all.” They moved on, approaching the flanks of the Lebanon range. The hills rose and the land crumpled and the road turned to gravel. Wells imagined lines tightening on a topographic map. He rode slowly, his legs spread wide for balance, feet off the pegs. The road turned along the base of a ravine and was blocked by a gate topped with thick strands of razor wire. Behind the gate, the road swung left and disappeared behind a hill. Wells clicked on the GPS in his pocket to save the location, then turned to Gaffan and twirled a finger: Let’s get out of here.

  For the rest of the afternoon, they repeated the drill. Wells saved three more possible locations, fenced areas or walled houses that looked suspicious.

  The sun had disappeared behind the mountains by the time they rented rooms at the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek. Directly across from the temple ruins, the Palmyra had a long and glorious history. The Germans had occupied it during World War I, the British in World War II. The hotel still had a certain faded glamour, with stained-glass windows and overgrown trees in its yard. But its rugs were threadbare and its showers offered only cold water.

  Wells and Gaffan cleaned up and sat in the back garden, drinking lukewarm, too-sweet coffee. As far as Wells could tell, they were the hotel’s only guests.

  “You think we found it?”

  “Could have. I already called Ellis. Asked for fresh day and night overheads”—satellite photographs. “For all four locations, but especially the first.”

  Wells had also asked whether the agency had any new information on the Jeddah bombing or the earlier attacks. The answer was a predictable and dispiriting no. The agency was so focused on Al Qaeda that this new group had caught it wrong-footed. Wells had kept Abdullah’s suspicions about Saeed to himself. Wells trusted Shafer, but it was always possible that Duto or someone even higher up would decide that the United States would gain by leaking information about Abdullah’s problems to MI6 or the Mossad. Wells preferred not to take that chance.

  “So will they help?”

  “He wouldn’t promise, but I think so. It’s in their interest. Waiting will hold us up for at least one night, maybe two, but I don’t care. I wa
nt to know what’s on the other side before we go over that fence.”

  “Then how do they get the overheads to us?”

  “Gmail.”

  “You really think they’re going to send Keyhole imagery to you on Gmail.” The Keyhole was the National Reconnaissance Office’s finest toy, able to read license plates from space.

  “They may degrade them, but yes.”

  “Because they want us to go in, even though Shafer told you not to.”

  “Correct.”

  “Hell of a game.”

  “The best,” Wells said. “And the worst.”

  CHAPTER 14

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THE SATELLITE SHOTS FILLED THE WALL-SIZED FLAT-PANEL SCREEN in Shafer’s office, as clear as life. Maybe clearer. Thanks to mirrors and lenses machined to ten-millionths of a meter, the fifth-generation Keyholes could take daylight photos from low earth orbit at five-centimeter resolution — about two inches.

  With five-centimeter resolution, the photos revealed not just the number of men in a unit but also fine tactical details, such as the weapons they carried and whether they wore beards. The NRO promised that the next generation of satellites would reach one-centimeter resolution, enough to distinguish individual features. “Face from space,” the program was called.

  Shafer remembered when one meter had been state-of-the-art. And he remembered when the overheads had been couriered around Washington in armored vans. These days the process was digital, start to finish. Data and imagery moved between the CIA and other three-letter agencies at the speed of light on an encrypted fiber-optic trunk line that circled Washington.

  Shafer felt he’d made the transition pretty well. Technology didn’t scare him. He’d watched the agency go from analog to digital, watched it suffer through Aldrich Ames and Wen Ho Lee, watched its top targets move from walled palaces in Moscow and Beijing to nameless caves in Pakistan. He didn’t count himself as overly nostalgic. In truth, the CIA was probably more effective now than it had been during the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union had left it without a mission. The chaotic years after September 11 had been worse. George Tenet, the director at the time, proved to be the ultimate kiss-up and kick-down manager, never letting the facts get in the way of what the White House wanted to hear.

  But since Tenet’s resignation in 2004, the agency had slowly rebuilt itself to face the new threat. The clandestine service hired as many Arabic speakers as it could find and pushed toward the front lines in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At home, the intelligence directorate encouraged debates, fighting the groupthink that submerged unpopular positions.

  Yet the CIA’s new vigor had come at a price. In the short term, drone strikes and coercive interrogations disrupted Al Qaeda and contained attacks. But as long as average Egyptians and Pakistanis believed that the United States was their enemy, Muslim extremism would thrive. “The guerrillas are the fish, and the people are the water,” Mao had said. Drone attacks that killed civilians were fish food. So was support for repressive and undemocratic governments. The agency was doing a good job tactically. Strategically, not so much.

  But then the agency didn’t set strategy, despite what the conspiracy theorists thought. The ultimate decision-maker lived five miles away on the other side of the Potomac. And whichever party he represented, he could never plan too far ahead. Not with elections every two years. So the strategy became: Stop the jihadis today, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

  Though Shafer didn’t have too many tomorrows left, either. His mandatory retirement was fast approaching. The clichés were true, too. Time did fly. The days were long, but the years were short. Shafer still remembered the wonder he’d felt on his first morning as he drove onto the campus in his Oldsmobile, a brand now extinct.

  More and more, Shafer found himself thinking of bonds made and broken. He and Jennifer Exley and Wells had known one another for fifteen years. Shafer would trust either of them with his life. And he knew the other two felt the same way, even if Wells was angry about what had happened on their last mission.

  Yet the three of them had splintered. Wells and Exley had quit the agency. Wells had an uncontrollable thirst for action — a rage, really. Exley had left him because she was sure he would eventually get himself killed. And she was probably right. Wells was both lucky and good. But luck couldn’t last forever, and skills inevitably eroded. Yet Shafer couldn’t imagine reining in Wells. He belonged in the field like no one Shafer had ever met. After everything he’d done, he had earned the right to die with his boots on.

  But not this time. Not this mission.

  WITH THAT THOUGHT, SHAFER focused on the satellite shots, resolving to glean every detail he could. He would send the overheads to Wells, of course, but they wouldn’t be nearly this sharp when they arrived. The agency would have no choice but to degrade them, in part because the file sizes were far too large for a civilian Internet account. And Wells wouldn’t have a display panel as good as his, either.

  Shafer knocked out two locations quickly. They were nothing more than well-guarded hash farms, complete with tractors and pesticide sprayers. The third, in the northern foothills of the Lebanon range, was trickier. Mysterious tarp-covered mounds and half-buried concrete sheds were scattered across it. Still, Shafer thought he was looking at a Hezbollah arms depot, not a jihadi camp. Only two cars and three unarmed men were visible. The mounds and sheds most likely held howitzers and missile launchers — or possibly decoys to siphon Israeli air attacks from Hezbollah’s real depots.

  Which left the fourth farm, the first that Wells and Gaffan had spotted, the one Wells believed was correct. Two different Keyholes had taken overhead passes, one just before noon and the second at about two a.m. the next day. Noon was the ideal time for satellite shots. Direct overhead sunlight minimized shadows and shined brightly off metal. The reflections helped the image-processing software that searched for half-hidden bits of steel and aluminum, pipes that might be bunker vents or coin-shaped disks that could be mines. Shafer was looking for more obvious features. From what Wells said, this camp would have been recently built and only semipermanent, with privacy and size as its main considerations.

  Wells’s instincts looked on target. A one-story barracks sat in a rocky valley a mile south of the gate that seemed to mark the property line. Shafer judged it would be invisible from anywhere outside the property. Its concrete was white and new, but the construction was shoddy. A small generator at the back of the barracks powered a string of bulbs. Three SUVs and a ten-wheel panel truck were parked in front. A blue tarp covered the truck, though Shafer could faintly make out Arabic letters in the back corner, where the tarp had come loose.

  Just past the barracks, the road turned west, toward the mountains. It dead-ended a quarter-mile up at a two-story concrete house, cheap and gaudy in hash-farmer style, with balconies and filigrees. But the house’s yellow paint was faded, its concrete cracked. Shafer guessed that it had been abandoned a few years back, long before the barracks was built. Two satellite television receivers sat on the roof. One was old, its wires disconnected, the other new. No transmission equipment, though. A new diesel generator and a half-dozen barrels sat beside the house, presumably fuel from the gas station in Qaa. Next to them was a small shack.

  The road between the barracks and the house was well-trod. Shafer guessed they slept in the barracks, trained and ate in the house. A couple other details struck him. A deep pit had been dug near the barracks. Given the hardness of the Bekaa’s soil, excavating the pit would have required backhoes. It would have been dug only for a good reason. Maybe live explosives training.

  Behind the house, he spotted what might have been a makeshift helicopter pad, flat ground with a small white X painted at its center. He might have been wrong. No helicopter was visible, and he didn’t see anywhere to hide one. Still. A helicopter pad. Ambitious. Shafer clicked back to the first image, the barracks, to take another look—

  His phone interrupted hi
m. Vinny Duto. The DCI.

  “Can you come up?”

  “Love to,” Shafer lied.

  Duto’s office was on the seventh floor of the Original Headquarters Building. The view was nice, but the company wasn’t. Duto had tightened his control over the intelligence community in the last year, thanks in part to Wells and Shafer. In their last mission, they had unwittingly helped him topple his biggest rival, the director of national intelligence, a job created after September 11 to serve as a check on the CIA.

  But Duto might have regained control on his own. Technically, the director of central intelligence reported to the DNI. But the DNI didn’t have any clandestine operatives of his own, only analysts. Analysis was nice, but power came from the operational side. And operations belonged to Duto. With the DNI neutered, Duto had no real rivals for control. But power hadn’t mellowed him. Not even close. Wall Street bankers never had enough money, and men like Duto never had enough power. Shafer knew that Duto found him — and especially Wells, who couldn’t be controlled and who lived by a set of principles that Duto would never understand — deeply irritating.

  Though Duto had certainly outsmarted them both last year.

  Shafer walked into Duto’s office to find it nearly dark, the electrically controlled shades down, as Duto examined the Lebanese overheads on his own flat-panel. Shafer sat. Duto ignored him for a couple minutes, flicking through the images. When he turned off the screen, the shades rose automatically. “Pretty pictures. What’s Wells going to do with them?”

  “Hi, Vinny. Good to see you. You too. How’s the wife? The kids?”

  “Yeah, yeah. What about the overheads?”

  “Wells hasn’t told me, but I imagine he’s going to raid that camp. As you know.”

  “And you signed off on sending satellite shots over the Internet?”

  “Is there some plausible deniability thing happening here? Aren’t we past that? It’s just overheads. You can find them on Google Earth.”