by Mark Greaney
28
Lieutenant General Ri Tae-jin of the Reconnaissance General Bureau was surprised with the incredible speed at which his plan was taking shape. Normally when a scheme formed at anything more than a snail’s pace he was satisfied, so hard was the intelligence game when it came to real-world application. But his new operation—the computer had chosen the code name Fire Axe—might have been progressing too fast for its own good. Fire Axe, if successful, would culminate with the assassination of the President of the United States, and the general had more concerns than good feelings about its prospects—he wondered if he was rushing into a maelstrom of his own making.
He hoped the quick development of Fire Axe was simply fortune intervening, and that his good fortune would continue. And as each step of the operation came and went with a positive outcome, he became . . . if not more confident, at least less quick to dismiss the entire prospect of the affair.
Ri had lost full confidence in Choi Ji-hoon, but he did have to admit, the Dae Wonsu was absolutely right in his analysis. Killing Jack Ryan would almost unquestionably lead to success in his other quest, that to obtain a working mid-range ICBM.
He allowed himself to entertain thoughts of the post-Ryan world, where North Korea had the ability to strike the United States or Western Europe with a plutonium missile. He didn’t consider actually seeing the ICBM put to use in this task. No, that would mean the certain death of everyone in North Korea when the USA retaliated. But if North Korea possessed the missile and threatened to use it, the fortunes of his nation would be starkly and unquestioningly improved.
And this was part of the fuel that spurred him forward. The other part, the larger part, was the same fuel that propelled his quest for the ICBM. His own self-preservation. He did not have the luxury to shelve Fire Axe if it did not pan out perfectly, because he knew his next meeting with Choi, were he to balk at the assassination attempt, would only lead to his own death.
The evening after his meeting with Choi at his Kangdong-gun property he had organized an emergency conference with his top lieutenants and he tasked them to work on the plan. Almost immediately there was a framework—in truth, the assassination of world leaders was a constant theoretical, and occasional real-world, exercise at RGB, and several proposals were drawn up every month, so the infrastructure was already in place.
And there were few state actors on earth more experienced in international crime than North Korea.
Even though North Korea was known as being a nation cut off from the rest of the world, its intelligence was, in fact, uniquely well positioned for a conspiracy on a global scale. Ri personally worked with top agents of many regimes, either buying or selling weapons and sending his officers and agents into other nations to train their officers and agents in the art of enhanced interrogation techniques.
And the RGB was also deeply involved with most all of the major criminal syndicates in the world. They made millions of dollars every year in the drug trade producing and selling methamphetamine, mostly to European crime families or Mexican drug cartels. They printed and trafficked counterfeit hard currency, and bought and sold illegal weapons of all classification.
Ri and his staff knew the players who could make Fire Axe a reality, there was no question that he could put an assassin with a network in the same place as the American President. But to do it with no comebacks on North Korea was another matter entirely.
Ri and his officers looked at all Ryan’s scheduled foreign travel over the next few months. He’d be in Europe on two separate trips. Once in Berlin at a trade conference, and once in Poland for another meeting of NATO leadership.
He would also be in Mexico City in two and a half weeks’ time for a two-day official visit, and later he would fly to Buenos Aires for two more days of meetings and travel.
Europe was an enticing possibility for the simple matter that relations between the United States and Russia were terrible at the moment. Ri knew the Russian president, Valeri Volodin, wanted Jack Ryan dead, and more important, he knew the Americans knew it. But fingering Russia would be all but impossible. Yes, he had contacts in Moscow, but mostly with small computer hacking organizations or with Rosoboronexport, the nation’s state-owned arms trader. He’d dealt in drugs with a Russian bratva, but he didn’t have the influence over them he needed to perpetrate such a crime.
Ri liked Mexico more. The timeline was short, but the atmospherics were perfect. Six months earlier one of the larger and more violent Mexican drug cartels lost its leader, Antonio Maldonado, in a shootout with Federal Police in Acapulco. The Guerrero-based Maldonado cartel had been reeling ever since, and now that the leader’s younger brother, Santiago Maldonado, had been put in charge they had shown themselves to be even more volatile, more reactionary, than before. It had been rumored at the time of the killing that the Mexican authorities had found Antonio Maldonado only through the technical help they received from a group of American military communications specialists. The unit, known informally as the Activity, had been instrumental in locating Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar more than twenty years earlier, and they had been in and out of South America ever since pinch-hitting for friendly nations in the war on drugs. Neither the U.S. nor Mexico had acknowledged the fact American military advisers were on the ground in Acapulco when Antonio Maldonado was cut down in a fusillade of carbine fire, but his brother, the mercurial Santiago, had vowed revenge.
Ri contacted his non-official cover officers in Mexico who worked with the Maldonado cartel, and they confirmed they thought it likely he could be persuaded to support an assassination attempt on the American President. Santiago was a drug-addled, nihilistic maniac, according to Ri’s officers, and if Santiago harbored any concerns for his own self-preservation he didn’t show them. Moreover, he would have absolutely no qualms about sending his own cultlike followers to a slaughter if there was the chance to exact retribution for the man responsible for his brother’s death.
But the North Koreans quickly realized that although Maldonado had men and guns, his force was unskilled, and he had no way to assassinate the President of the United States.
General Ri decided that the Mexican cartel could, however, still play a crucial role in the operation, because Ri knew where to find the killer.
He looked to another piece of the puzzle after he fleshed out the idea he had relayed to the Dae Wonsu. The general himself spoke with a close confidant who formerly was the head of Syria’s General Security Directorate, but had gone into hiding in North Africa during the war. Ri let the man know he was looking for someone who could work independently and be involved in a high-level assassination. The Syrian did not ask about the target, since he knew Ri would not tell him. Instead, he accepted a finder’s fee to give Ri the contact information for a single bomb maker, a man who, so said the Syrian, was both abundantly talented and looking for a way out of his present circumstance.
Ri was surprised to see the contact was not Syrian himself. He was Iranian, but he worked independently of Tehran; in fact, he’d freelanced as a bomb maker for the last few years. Ri contacted the Syrian government and asked for the opportunity to hire the man for some training in North Korea. They were open to the idea, and they arranged a meeting.
Adel Zarif lived in a Syrian intelligence safe house in Damascus, the city in which the Iranian had been living for more than three years. There was a price on his head by both Hezbollah and the Free Syrian Army rebels, and rumors were he was on an American presidential kill list as well.
Hezbollah wanted him dead for leaving their fold and turning freelance, the FSA wanted him dead for killing hundreds of their fighters in the civil war, and American drones combed the world for him because of the years he spent in Iraq, training insurgents in his specialty.
The improvised explosive device.
Zarif disagreed with the term; to him there was nothing improvised about his explosive devices. He had studied electr
ical engineering in Tehran before becoming a Hezbollah operative; in the nineties he’d wired bombs for Hezbollah and built bomb vests for Palestinian terrorists in southern Lebanon. When the war came to Iraq he was already in the country, already working with the Shiite militias, and Hezbollah pulled him back home for further training and study of tactics to defeat American armor. He came up with ingenious low-tech ways to build and employ explosively formed penetrator weapons, a normally high-tech device that shapes metal projectiles by the blast of the explosive, sending them through steel like a knife through butter.
He destroyed his first American tank in 2005, and by 2007, a year in which 33,900 IED attacks took place against coalition forces in Iraq, Zarif had trained hundreds of bomb makers in his tactics.
He was moved to Afghanistan in 2011 by Hezbollah, and there he built his largest IED. He wired a two-thousand-pound bomb to a detonator and placed it in the back of a water truck. A martyr then drove it into Kandahar, and made it to within one hundred yards of a British base before he was shot dead by a sniper’s bullet. He then let go of the dead man’s switch, detonating the device and killing seventy-six, all but five of them local.
By the time of the Arab Spring and the civil wars throughout the region Zarif was in his late forties, and he was old enough to see he was being used as a tool by different sects, beliefs, tribes, and factions. He decided his only true allegiance was to himself, and he went freelance.
The Syrian government snatched him up, both to help their forces build booby traps in the cities they fled in order to escape the FSA and to take him off the market so that he did not fight against them. The relationship was transactional, he didn’t care for the Assad regime any more than he cared for the people he blew to bits with his IEDs. But soon he was with Assad’s 17th Division, wiring entire buildings to blow on trip wires and lining roads behind the division’s retreat with car bombs.
His reputation grew in Syria, and the world’s intelligence organizations located him through his actions. Soon it became clear he could not leave Damascus because of all the parties who wanted him dead.
Ri’s agents met him at his safe house, and they revealed they weren’t there to talk about a training trip to North Korea. Instead, they proposed the plan to transport him to Mexico City, link him up with agents of a local group there, and to provide him with all the intelligence and material he needed to kill the U.S. President. After he succeeded, he would then be secreted out of the country by North Korean agents and taken either back to Syria if he wanted or, better yet, to North Korea, where he would live all of the rest of his days feeling the warmth of a grateful nation. The agents showed him pictures on their tablet computer of his future home, a palace on the beaches near the city of Hamhung, along with photos of beautiful young girls, any of which he could choose as his own to be his wife.
Zarif wanted out of Syria, and he saw this Mexico City operation as his best bet. But he did not agree to it outright. He knew his only chance to make it to the beautiful beaches and live like a king in a palace was success in his mission and the absolute deniability that either he or North Korea had any involvement. He peppered the agents with technical questions and he demanded to go to North Korea to meet with the leadership there.
Ri did not like this, but he saw no choice.
Although the Syrian government had all but held their best bomb maker like a prisoner for the past few years, North Korean intelligence officers persuaded Zarif’s handlers to give him travel documents to leave the country. The North Koreans said they wanted to bring Zarif to Pyongyang to train their direct-action forces in how to make explosively formed penetrator bombs, and while there, North Koreans would in turn give him access to recently acquired high-tech South Korean communications equipment. This knowledge would help him keep up with advances in remote detonators. Working in Syria, he’d had little access to new equipment, and the DPRK convinced the Syrian government that a short trip for Zarif would be in Syria’s best interests.
The ruse was a lie, of course. Zarif would travel to Mexico, he would kill the President of the United States, and he would then retire to the ocean side in North Korea.
Or so Zarif had been led to believe.
Zarif was transported to Pyongyang the next day, where he met with Ri and others, and when he showed reluctance to agree to the plan—he was unsure of the efficiency of the Mexicans and the credibility of their intelligence—he was flown to Hamhung and shown his future home.
The palace existed, it was stately and impressive, and the beautiful girls were lined up at the entryway to meet him. Adel Zarif was sold.
In truth, the mansion was one of many properties for use by the Supreme Leader, and General Ri had no plans to call the Dae Wonsu and tell him he was offering up his home to a foreign Muslim assassin.
No. As Adel Zarif smiled and shook Ri’s hand on the tarmac in Pyongyang, anxious to leave North Korea to head to Mexico to begin preparations for the biggest operation of his career, the sad, hangdog eyes of General Ri brightened for a moment, and he smiled back. The man before him would die during the execution of Operation Fire Axe, and no one in the world would know Zarif had ever been here.
29
Edward Riley left his BMW i8 parked in a garage on 23rd Street and walked the last six blocks to his destination. It was raining this afternoon in Manhattan, but this was good news for Riley, because it gave him an excuse to wear his raincoat. He would have worn it anyway for operational reasons, but it would have looked odd in the sun.
He’d received a call five minutes earlier letting him know his trap had been sprung. He wasn’t sure exactly how long he should wait before showing up at the trap, but he knew his best chance for success was to catch his victim at the exact moment of maximum distress, so he did not delay.
On 29th near Lexington he turned off of the sidewalk and walked down a few steps to a basement entrance below a five-story apartment building. He rapped on the metal door a few times and then closed his umbrella, leaving it against a small table sitting there by the door.
The door was opened from the inside a moment later. Riley stepped into a poorly lit narrow hallway, and he nodded to the middle-aged Asian woman standing there.
“Room four,” she said, her gravelly voice barely above a whisper.
Riley headed up the hall, taking care to avoid touching anything. Not the walls or the doorknobs of the doors he passed. He even made sure his pants leg below his raincoat didn’t brush against the curtains covering an alcove on his right.
It wasn’t that he was trying to avoid leaving fingerprints or DNA at the scene. Instead, he kept his hands tight at his sides and his slacks away from any surface at ankle height because Riley felt this place was utterly filthy. It was a massage parlor, a house of prostitution, and it was in heavy use from what Riley had been told.
Riley’s men had followed a man to this establishment twice in three days. It was clear that his target had a habit, so Riley stopped in to talk to the proprietor, then flashed a badge, a smile, and some cash. He showed the Japanese “mamasan” in charge a picture of his target, then asked her to tip him off the next time the man showed up. Riley explained how he would conduct a raid, and he told her she’d make two thousand dollars to reimburse her for the disturbance to her business, and he assured her that her cooperation would mean the New York Police Department would show its gratitude by not interfering with her operation afterward.
His promises were only half bullshit.
The two grand Riley could come up with, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about the NYPD.
At the door marked 4 he used his elbow, enshrouded in his raincoat, and with it he banged just once. This door, like the other, was opened from the inside, but this time he was greeted by an American. A black man in his thirties, big and strong, with a badge around his neck proclaiming him to be a detective from the NYPD.
Riley knew Bridgeforth wasn�
�t a detective. He was an employee of Sharps Partners, and a subordinate of Riley’s, but the badge went along with today’s ruse.
Riley reached into his raincoat, around his neck, and he pulled out a similar-looking badge of his own.
There was one more person here in room 4 with Riley and Bridgeforth, and the badges were for his benefit. Seated on a wooden massage table was a thin, middle-aged European-looking male wearing nothing but his underwear.
Riley nodded to Bridgeforth and the African American left the room, shutting the door behind him. He ignored the one chair in the room. Instead, he stood in front of the door, his raincoat thin protection against the trillions of microbes he pictured swarming in the air around him.
The thin man looked at him with panic-stricken eyes.
Good, Riley thought.
The Englishman could do a spot-on New York accent; he’d practiced it for hundreds of hours in the past year, even going days “in character” around the city, to the point he never saw any hint of doubt from anyone he came in contact with.
He slipped into his character with ease. In his booming Brooklyn voice he said, “Detective Rich Kincaid, NYPD.” And then, “Vice.”
The man before him just nodded, then he spoke with a pronounced Austrian accent. “As I mentioned to your colleague, Detective, I have diplomatic immunity from prosecution.”
Riley shrugged, his hands wide, a gesture in keeping with his character. “Who’s prosecuting?”
“You are required to—”
“You are required to sit there and shut the fuck up!”
The Austrian recoiled in surprise.
“Now, let’s figure out where we stand here. You are Hans Tischer. You are with the Austrian delegation to the UN. That means, even though my partner has pictures of you bumping uglies with some teenage hooker right in the middle of America’s greatest city, I have to let you go.”