The trigger was pressed in Nevada. Over North Yemen, 60,000 feet high in a beautiful sunrise, two Hellfire missiles detached themselves from the Predator, sniffed the nose-cone signal like hunting dogs and tilted down to the desert. Twelve seconds later, both Land Cruisers and eight men vaporized.
Within six months, J-SOC had ample evidence that Asiri, still only thirty, had continued making bombs, and they were getting more and more sophisticated. He began to experiment with the implantation of explosives inside the human body, where no scanner could spot them.
He sent his kid brother to assassinate the Saudi head of counterterrorism, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef. The youth claimed he had renounced terrorism, wished to come home, possessed much information and sought an interview. The prince agreed to see him.
As he entered the room, the young Asiri simply blew up. The prince was lucky; he was blown backward through the door he had come in by, taking only some cuts and bruises.
The young Asiri had a small but powerful bomb up his anus. The detonator was a mobile-telephone-based device across the border. It was his own brother who designed and triggered it.
And the dead Awlaki had a successor. A man known only as the Preacher began to launch sermons into cyberspace. Just as powerful, just as hate filled, just as dangerous. Yemen’s ineffectual president fell to the Arab Spring. A new man took over, younger, more vigorous, prepared to cooperate with the U.S. in exchange for substantial developmental aid.
The drone coverage of Yemen increased. U.S.-paid agents proliferated. The army was launched against AQAP leaders. Quso was wiped out. But still it was presumed the Preacher, whoever he was, remained in Yemen. Now, thanks to a boy in a loft in Centerville, the Tracker knew better.
• • •
As Tracker closed the file on the life of Awlaki, a report came through from those Gray Fox had simply called the drone boys. For this operation, J-SOC was not using the CIA drone facility out of Nevada but its own dedicated unit out of Pope Air Force Base near Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The report was succinct and to the point. Trucks had been seen visiting the target warehouse/shed in Kismayo. Some came, went undercover and left. They arrived loaded but left empty. Two were open-topped over the cargo area. What they seemed to be carrying was a cargo of fruit and vegetables. Endit.
Tracker turned and stared at the portrait of the Preacher on his wall. What the hell do you want with fruit and vegetables? he mused.
He stretched, rose and walked out into the summer warmth. Ignoring the smiles of those in the parking lot, he hauled his Fireblade off its stand, pulled on his helmet with the visor down and cruised out through the gate. When he hit the highway, he turned south for D.C., then off the main road for Centerville.
“I want you to check something for me,” he told Ariel, as he crouched in the semidarkness of the attic. “Someone is buying fruit and vegetables in Kismayo. Can you find out where it is coming from and where it is going to?”
There were others at computer consoles he could have approached, but in a vast arms-industrial-espionage complex teeming with rivals and loose mouths Ariel had two unpurchasable advantages: He reported to only one man and he never talked to anybody. Ariel’s fingers flickered away. The map of lower Somalia swam into view.
“It’s not all desert,” he said. “There is a richly forested and planted area along both banks of the Lower Juba Valley. Look, you can see the farms.”
Tracker studied the patchwork quilt of orchards and plantations, a splash of green against the dull ocher desert. The country’s only fertile zone, the food bowl of the south. If those cargoes were harvested in the plantations he was staring at and trucked to Kismayo, where thence? Local markets or export?
“Go to Kismayo port zone.”
Like everything else, the port was pretty shattered. Once it had thrived, but the quay was broken in a dozen places, the old derricks tilted and damaged beyond use. It could be that a freighter came in occasionally. Not to discharge. What could al-Shabaab’s bankrupt ministate import and pay for? But to pick something up? Fruit and vegetables? Maybe. But destination where? And for what?
“Search the commercial world, Ariel. See if any company trades with Kismayo. Anyone buying fruit and vegetables raised in the Lower Juba Valley. If so, who are they? Maybe they own the warehouse.”
He left him to it and returned to TOSA.
• • •
In the extreme northern suburbs of Tel Aviv, off the road to Herzliya, in a quiet street just down from a food market, is a large, nondescript office block that its inhabitants simply call the Office. It is the headquarters of Mossad. Two days after Tracker’s meeting with Simon Jordan at the Mandarin Oriental, three men in short-sleeved, open-necked shirts met in the director’s office. That room had seen quite a few momentous conferences.
It was where, in the autumn of 1972 after the summer slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Zvi Zamir had ordered his kidonim (bayonets) to go out, find and kill the Black September fanatics responsible. Such was the decision by Prime Minister Golda Meir to launch Operation Wrath of God. Over forty years later, it was still shabby.
The men were of different ranks and ages but only used first names. The oldest had been there twenty years and needed only the fingers of one hand to recall the times he had heard surnames. The grizzled director was Uri, the chief of operations was David and the youngest, running the Horn of Africa desk, Benny.
“The Americans are asking for our help,” said Uri.
“Surprise me,” muttered David.
“It seems they have tracked down the Preacher.”
He had no need to explain. Jihadi terrorism has several targets for its violence, and Israel is far up the list, along with the U.S. Everyone present knew of the top fifty in the world, even though Hamas to their south, Hezbollah to their north and Iran’s al-Quds thugs to their east jostled for first in the queue. The Preacher’s sermons might target America and Britain, but they knew who he was.
“It appears he is in Somalia, sheltering with al-Shabaab. Their request is very simple: Do we have an asset implanted in South Somalia?”
Both senior men looked at Benny. He was a former member of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando, fluent in Arabic to the point where he could pass unnoticed across the border, and thus one of the mistaravim. He studied the pencil in his hands.
“Well, Benny, do we?” David asked gently. They all knew what was coming, and agent runners hate to lend one of their assets for a foreign agency’s concerns.
“Yes, we do. Just one. He is embedded in the port of Kismayo.”
“How do you communicate with him?” asked the director.
“With extreme difficulty,” said Benny. “And slowly. It takes time. We can’t just send in a message. He can’t send a card. Even e-traffic could be monitored. There are trainee bombers in there now. Western-educated. Technology-savvy. Why?”
“If the Yankees want to use him, we would have to speed up communications. A miniaturized two-way transceiver,” said David. “And it ought to cost them.”
“Oh, it would cost them, all right,” said the director. “But you could leave that to me. I’ll tell them ‘maybe,’ and we’ll discuss price.”
He did not mean money; he meant help in a score of other ways—the Iranian atomic bomb program, the release of very high-tech classified equipment. He would have quite a shopping list.
“Does he have a name?” asked David.
“Opal,” said Benny. “Agent Opal. He’s a tally clerk on the fishing dock.”
• • •
Gray Fox did not waste time.
“You’ve been talking to the Israelis,” he said.
“True. Have they come back?”
“With a vengeance. They have a man. Deep inside. In Kismayo, as it happens. They are prepared to help, but there are outrageous demands. You know the Israelis. They don’t give away sand in the Negev.”
“But they want to discuss price?”
/> “Yes,” said Gray Fox, “but not at our level. It’s above our pay grade. Their top man at the embassy went straight to the commander of J-SOC.”
“Did he turn them down?”
“Amazingly, no. Demands acceded. You can go ahead. Your contact man is their head of station. Do you know him?”
“Yes. Fleetingly.”
“Well, you can go ahead. Tell them what you want and they’ll try to deliver.”
• • •
There was a message from Ariel when he got back to his office.
“There seems to be one purchaser of Somali fruit, vegetables and spices. A company called Masala Pickles. It makes hot chutneys and pickles, the sort the British eat with their curries. The produce is bottled or frozen or canned in a plant in Kismayo, then shipped to the main factory.”
The Tracker rang him. To a listener the exchange would have been meaningless, so he did not encrypt.
“Got your message, Ariel. Well done. Just a detail: Where is the main factory?”
“Oh, sorry, Colonel. It’s in Karachi.”
Karachi. Pakistan. Of course.
7
A twin-engined, propeller-driven Beech King Air took off before dawn from Sde Dov, the military airfield north of Tel Aviv, turned southeast and began to climb. It passed over Be’er Sheva, flew through the no-fly zone over the atomic plant at Dimona and left Israeli airspace south of Eilat.
Its livery was snow white, with the words “United Nations” down the fuselage. The tailfin bore the large letters WFP for World Food Programme. Had anyone checked its registration number, the latter would have revealed it was owned by a shell company lodged in Grand Cayman and on long-term charter to the WFP. All of which was nonsense.
It belonged to the Metsada (Special Ops) division of Mossad and lived in the Sde Dov hangar that once housed the black Spitfire of Ezer Weizman, founder of the Israeli air force.
South of the Gulf of Aqaba, the King Air followed a course between the landmasses of Saudi Arabia to the east and Egypt/Sudan to the west. It remained in international airspace the length of the Red Sea until it crossed the coast of Somaliland and on over Somalia. Neither state had interceptor facility.
The white plane recrossed the Somali coast with the Indian Ocean north of Mogadishu and altered course southwest to fly parallel to the coast at 5,000 feet and just offshore. Any observer would have presumed it came from a nearby charity/aid base, since it had no external fuel tanks and therefore limited range. That same observer would not have seen that much of the interior was occupied by two huge fuel tanks.
Just south of Mogadishu, the cameraman readied his equipment and began to film after Marka. Excellent images of the entire beach were obtained from Marka to a point fifty miles north of Kismayo, a total stretch involving two hundred miles of sandy shore.
Then the cameraman shut down, and the King Air peeled away. It retraced its flight, switched from internal fuel tanks to main supply and returned home. After twelve hours airborne, it just squeezed in to Eilat airport, refueled and went on to Sde Dov. A motorcyclist took the camera pack to the Mossad’s photographic analysis unit for study.
What Benny wanted, and got, was a clearly unmissable rendezvous spot along the coast road where he could meet Agent Opal with fresh instructions and the necessary equipment. The spot he wanted would have to be unmistakable for someone motoring up the highway and a fast inflatable coming off the sea.
When he had his spot, he prepared his message for Opal.
• • •
Warden Doherty tried to run a decent penitentiary, and, of course, it had a chapel. But he did not want his daughter married there. As the father of the bride, he was prepared to make her day truly memorable, so the ceremony was planned at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, with a reception at the Clarendon Hotel downtown.
There had been mentions of the wedding, time and place, in the social diary column of the Phoenix Republic, so it was no surprise that a crowd of both the curious and the well-wishers had gathered outside the doors of the church when the happy couple emerged.
No one paid much attention to the swarthy young man among the crowd, the one with the long white robes and faraway gaze. Not until he burst through the press of onlookers, ran up to the father of the bride with something in his right hand, as if he were offering a gift. It was not a gift; it was a Colt .45 handgun. He fired four times at Warden Doherty, who was thrown backward by the force of the impact and went down in a heap.
There were, as always when a true horror has not yet impacted, two seconds of uncomprehending silence. Then the reactions. Screams, shouts and, in this case, more shots, as two on-duty Phoenix police officers drew and fired. The assailant also went down. Others threw themselves flat amid the ensuing chaos; the hysterical Mrs. Doherty, the weeping bride ushered away, the wailing police cars and ambulances, the panicking crowd running in all directions.
Then the system took over. Crime scene taped off, firearm recovered and dropped in an evidence bag, identification of the assassin. Newscasts out of Arizona that evening told all the U.S. that there had been another one. And the recovered laptop of the fanatic, found in his room above the garage, where he worked, disgorged its long list of online sermons by the Preacher.
• • •
The U.S. Army film unit is called TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command), and it lives at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Normally, it makes training films and documentaries, explaining and extolling every aspect of the Army’s work and function. So the commanding officer had no hesitation in acquiescing to a request to meet with a certain Col. Jamie Jackson, serving with J-SOC headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, outside Tampa, Florida.
Even within the military, the Tracker saw no reason to reveal he was really Col. Kit Carson, came from TOSA and was assigned only a few miles away in the same state. It is simply called need to know.
“I want to make a short movie,” he said. “But this would have a classification of top secret, and the finished product would be seen by an extremely limited group of people.”
The CO was intrigued, slightly impressed but not fazed. He was proud of his unit’s talent for filmmaking. He could not recall such a strange request before, but that could make the offered assignment more interesting. He had filming facilities and sound studios right on the base.
“It will be a very small, short movie with one scene. There will be no location filming. It will involve one set, probably off base. It will involve no cameras save a single camcorder—sound and picture. It will be seen, if at all, only on the Internet. The unit will therefore be extremely small, probably no more than six, all sworn to secrecy. What I need is a young filmmaker steeped in movies,” said the visitor.
The Tracker got what he wanted: Captain Damian Mason. The CO did not get what he wanted, which was an answer to his numerous questions. What he did get was a call from a three-star general, telling him that, in this man’s army, orders are obeyed. Damian Mason was young, eager and a movie buff since he was knee-high in White Plains, New York. When he had served his time with TRADOC, he wanted to go west to Hollywood and make real movies, with stories and stars.
“Will this be a training film, sir?” he asked.
“I hope it will be instructive, in its way,” said the Marine colonel. “Tell me, is there one single directory with the photographs of every available actor in the country?”
“I think you mean the Academy players directory. Every casting director in the country has one.”
“Is there one on base?”
“I doubt it, sir. We don’t use professional actors.”
“We do now. Or one, at least. Can you get me a copy?”
“Sure, Colonel.”
• • •
It took two days to arrive by FedEx, and it was a very thick book, page after page of the faces of aspiring actors and actresses, juveniles right through to veterans.
Another science that police forces and intelligence agencies employ across the world is f
ace comparison. It helps detectives trace down runaway criminals who try to change their appearance.
Computerization has codified what used to be little more than a policeman’s hunch into a science. In the USA, the software is called Echelon, and it is lodged with the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility at Quantico, Maryland.
Basically, hundreds of facial measurements are taken and stored. Ears alone are like fingerprints—never the same. But with long hair, they are not always visible. The distance between eye pupils, measured to the micron, can eliminate a match in a fraction of a second. Or help confirm. Echelon has refused to be deceived by felons who have had extensive plastic surgery.
Terrorists caught by the cameras of drones have been identified in seconds as the real top target and not some bag carrier. It saves an expensive missile. The Tracker flew back east and set Echelon a task: Scan every male face in the players directory and find me a doppelgänger to this man. He offered them the face of the Preacher without the full beard. That could go back on later.
Echelon scanned nearly a thousand male faces and came up with one who, more than any other, looked like the Pakistani called Abu Azzam. Ethnically, he was Hispanic. His name was Tony Suárez. His résumé stated he had had bit parts and walk-on parts, appearances in crowds and even a few words to speak in a commercial for barbecue equipment.
The Tracker went back to his office at TOSA. There was a report from Ariel. His father had found a store selling foreign foodstuffs and brought him a jar of Masala pickles and another of mango chutney. The computer revealed that almost all the fruit and spice ingredients were grown in the plantations of the Lower Juba Valley.
There was more. Commercial data banks revealed Masala was highly successful in Pakistan and the Middle East, and also Great Britain, with its taste for spicy foods and Indian curries. It was wholly owned by its founder, Mr. Mustafa Dardari, who had a mansion in Karachi and a town house in London. Finally, there was a photo of the tycoon, blown up from a boardroom “smiley” picture.