“The West will not be able to burn us in the nuclear fires, because our oil fields will last a thousand years, and without this fuel the West will die.”
He squeezed his hand in front of his face. “We will own them.”
Now he lowered his hand and his head. “The twenty-eight of us will not live to see that day. We will surely die in the jihad, and we will achieve paradise for ourselves and for our loved ones. We will make this journey on earth good for all future Muslims . . . imagine the rewards that will be bestowed upon us for our valuable sacrifices.”
The audience was at one with him in his reverence for their fight to come.
“You are the swords against the oppressors, and the shields of the oppressed. There are only two paths forward. Victory or martyrdom.”
The twenty-seven students of the Language School shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”
—
At one o’clock in the morning the SUVs that were seen a month earlier going up the hillside out of San Rafael rumbled back down into San Rafael, on their way to the highway. The villagers took note, and they wondered if this meant the sounds of gunfire would cease and the damn dogs of the village would stop barking so much.
11
The three operators of The Campus converged in John Clark’s office at nine on Monday morning, each with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. They were dressed informally; it was hot as hell in D.C. this summer, so Jack and Dom wore polo shirts and linen dress pants, while Clark wore a collared short-sleeved button-down shirt and Chavez wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his muscular forearms.
Normally there would be a little lighthearted chatter before getting down to business, but the two younger men were both still painfully aware of their errors on the exercise up in Maryland on Friday. They’d follow cues from the two older men. If there was to be any joking during this meeting, Dom and Jack knew better than to start it themselves.
As they both halfway expected, John Clark made zero small talk before getting down to business. “I’ve been planning this expansion ever since I left the operational ranks and Sam died. I wanted Gerry to see how difficult a job you had performing complicated direct-action missions as short-staffed as you are. Frankly, I expected you to succeed, but for Gerry to listen in on the after-action report as you discussed how hamstrung you were with only three guns in the fight. Instead, you two fucked it up. I guess I should be glad that my point was made so well, but it’s never a good day when a training evolution informs you that you would have died in an identical real-world scenario.”
No one spoke.
Clark looked around the table slowly. Finally he said, “Good. I didn’t want to hear any lame excuses. It takes character to own your mistakes. Now it’s my job to get you the help you obviously need.
“You three have had the weekend to think it over. Ding, let’s start with you. Who do you recommend for an operational billet?”
Chavez said, “I nominate Bartosz Jankowski.”
Clark cocked his head; he didn’t recognize the name. “Who the hell is that?”
Chavez smiled now. He clearly knew he’d be getting that reaction. “You know him by his call sign, Midas.”
It had been well over a year since The Campus had worked with a small unit of Delta Force operators in Ukraine, during Russia’s initial invasion of the eastern portion of the nation. Midas had been the officer in charge of the Delta Force unit, and Clark remembered he’d been one impressive individual.
“Interesting. What do you know about him?”
Chavez said, “I asked around. I have some buddies behind the fence at Fort Bragg.”
Clark knew “behind the fence” was a euphemism for working at Delta, who were based at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, and were, indeed, separated by a fence from other forces there, at least nominally.
“And?”
“Luckily for us, Midas just got out of the military, retired after twenty years, but he’s only thirty-eight. A lieutenant colonel.”
Clark did the math. “If he’s been in the full twenty at that age, and an O, then he must have been a Mustang.”
“He was,” Ding confirmed.
Jack said, “You guys are speaking military again. What’s an O, and what’s a mustang?”
“An O is an officer, and a guy who enlists in the military, then turns into an officer, is called a Mustang officer. They have to go to college at some point, then leave the enlisted ranks to become an officer. They usually make great O’s, because they’ve seen military from the perspective of the men they lead.”
Chavez said, “Anyway, I didn’t hear anything but good stuff about Barry. His real name is Bartosz, he’s first-generation Polish, but he goes by Barry in the civilian world. His men loved him, the other O’s respected him, and Delta was damn sorry to lose him.”
Clark said, “What’s he doing now?”
Ding smiled again. “Fishing.”
“What?”
“He’s applied at CIA, but that’s a slow process, even for a former Delta dude. Some hangup with all the foreigners in his family, I suspect, although the military didn’t seem to care when he got into Delta.”
Clark wasn’t surprised by this. “CIA can be a confounding organization. How long till they get that straightened out?”
Chavez said, “I called Jimmy Hardesty to see what the scoop was on that. He said that if we wanted Midas, we better snatch him up, and quick. In the meantime, though, a guy who knows him says he’s pitching a tent on the grounds of Fort Bragg, fishing the lakes and rivers. Kind of an extended vacation before things get rough again.”
Clark made some notes. “Good selection, Ding. Okay, on to Jack. Who do you nominate?”
Jack said, “Adam Yao. CIA officer. We worked with him in Hong Kong a couple years back, and I ran into him again in California working that North Korea deal last year. He’s a very good man, smart as hell, unquestionably brave, and as dedicated as he can be. He speaks Mandarin, which could be handy.”
Clark said, “Young guy, from what I remember.”
“No, he’s getting up there in years. Probably thirty-four or so.” There was a glint in Jack’s eyes as he said this. Jack himself was just younger than this, while Clark was twice Yao’s age.
Clark’s eyes narrowed. “I can reach you from here, Jack. You want to get smacked?”
“Sorry, boss. Anyway, I checked him out a little bit and found out he’s not in the field at the moment. He’s working a desk at Langley.”
Clark thought it over. “Gerry will have to check with Mary Pat. We’re not stealing anybody out from under her or Canfield. Good nomination, though.”
Clark turned to Caruso. “Okay, Dom. Who’s your guy?”
Caruso hesitated.
The other three men in the room looked to him. Finally, Clark said, “Dom. You okay?”
“Yeah. Um . . . Well, my recommendation is that we promote Adara Sherman to an operational role.”
Jack Ryan just muttered softly, “Oh, boy.”
Dom found himself quickly defending his suggestion, even though he had reservations that were obvious on his face. “Look, we know what she’s done in the field, we know her background in the Navy. She’s a terrific employee here, she’s as vetted as we can possibly vet anyone, and she has a ton of training, even training we don’t have.”
Clark went silent for half a minute. Finally he looked to Chavez with a raised eyebrow. “Thoughts?”
Chavez said, “The one worry that keeps running through my mind is how we will be able to replace her on the aircraft. She’s doing such a kick-ass job now.”
Clark nodded. “If our main concern about promoting her is that she is terrific at her current position, I guess that means Dom has made one hell of a good recommendation.”
Caruso had been afraid someone would say that.
Clark turned to Jack now. “You said, ‘Oh, boy.’ You have a problem working with a woman in general, or with Adara in particular?”
Jack’s face reddened, and he looked around the room awkwardly. He said, “Neither. I think she’s awesome. I just . . .”
“You just what?”
Ryan looked to Dom Caruso for an instant, then looked away. “I think she’d be great. I really do.”
And he left it there.
But Dom knew what Jack was thinking. He was thinking about Dom, knowing that Adara was his girlfriend. And he was thinking about the prospect of Dom losing someone else close to him.
—
The President had his national security staff in for a morning briefing, and all the principals were in attendance. Surprisingly, the ongoing U.S. air and special ops campaign against ISIS in the Middle East ended up being dropped down to third place today on the list of critical areas that needed to be brought to Ryan’s attention. This wasn’t because nothing was going on in the fighting; rather, it was just the opposite. The United States, allied with Iraqi and Kurdish forces, and the Shiite forces allied with Iran, were making headway against the Islamic State on multiple fronts.
But other international hot spots competed every day as the primary concern of the Commander in Chief, and it was up to the men and women who wrote the presidential daily brief to decide what took top billing.
This morning, the first issue was China landing long-range bombers on islands it had constructed in the China Sea, and after the conference room discussed this for fifteen minutes, the topic turned to Russia’s ongoing attempt to move into parts of eastern Ukraine that the Ukrainian Army was having trouble holding.
Both of these events might have seemed, on the surface, at least, to be less important to American national interests than ongoing military operations involving American troops, but the United States’ unique position and responsibility in the world meant the Commander in Chief needed to be up to date on all crises, everywhere.
There was a never-ending hydra of challenges around the globe, but Ryan knew the worst possible course of action for the President would be to retreat from the world stage and stick his head in the sand. No, the hydra couldn’t be defeated, but with constant diplomacy, and with military and intelligence resources brought to bear, it could be battled back, just enough to keep America and its allies reasonably safe.
Ryan looked down to the third item on the day’s briefing. “Okay, Mary Pat, tell us about your trip to Iraq.”
“As you know,” she said, “we’ve been hunting top ISIS personality Abu Musa al-Matari. Since his failed attempt late last year to train and infiltrate sixteen well-trained jihadists with American passports or visas into the U.S., we’ve taken it as a given that he would try again.”
Ryan said, “He made it to within a hair’s breadth of getting killers on U.S. soil that we didn’t know anything about. And a guy like him is going to be very aware how close he came. Damn right he’ll try again. What did you learn?”
“I learned that he left Syria six and a half weeks ago to go to a place he referred to as the ‘Language School.’ We are working to find it.”
Ryan looked around at the other members of his NSC. “How do you know it’s not just a place where you learn to speak another language?”
Mary Pat smiled a little. “We can’t rule that out yet, but I doubt it. The intel came from one of al-Matari’s teen wives, a kidnapped Yazidi I spoke to. From the context of his other actions and travels, we think there’s more to this than an actual language school. We think it’s code for a location.”
The NSA director said, “We’ve done a broad spectrum data mine on the code phrase ‘Language School’ among Islamic State actors and suspected actors, suspected actors of affiliated organizations, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Any luck?”
“We found the haystack, not the needles. People talk about language schools in their conversations all the time, obviously. But we, I should say NSA and CIA analysts, are combing through the data by hand, and so far they have found nothing that sticks out. Not one suspicious reference in e-mails, recorded phone calls, interviews, international communications between suspects. Not yet, anyway.”
Dan Murray said, “I ordered the same search to be done in the USA for people currently under surveillance by federal authorities who aren’t part of the NSA’s purview, because the communications are CONUS to CONUS conversations. So far, same as NSA, nothing, but we’re still digging.”
Mary Pat said, “Al-Matari might have used this as code just between himself and one other person. The Yazidi girl might have heard something that wasn’t as wide in scope as we had hoped.”
Jay Canfield spoke up now. “We did, however, learn something interesting in Central America. Is it related? That we do not know. The day before last a helicopter crashed off the Pacific coast of Guatemala. There were six fatalities, all former Guatemalan Special Forces commandos. The helo had been rented by one of them from a company in Guatemala City, eight weeks prior to the crash. The last time anyone knew where the helicopter was it had landed at a property in Monterrico on the Guatemalan coast.”
Ryan cocked his head. “There’s more, I take it?”
Canfield nodded. “My local station looked into the men who were killed, and Dan’s people down there interviewed their wives and such yesterday. A couple had been told by their husbands they were going to El Salvador to teach a thirty-day guerrilla tactics course.”
Ryan asked the next question slowly. “To whom?”
“The wives didn’t know. Dan gave Mary Pat the info, and I had my station in El Salvador look into it. We came up empty, so I went to DEA on the off chance they’d have heard chatter. DEA has a good ground game in Central America, lots of HUMINT assets. It turns out DEA agents working on the Pacific coast spotted the helo when it was on the ground there. It was at an airstrip near Playa El Zonte, kind of a hippie surfer town. Frankly, it’s a really weird place to teach terrorist tactics.”
“Surfing terrorists,” Ryan said, and groaned. “Add that to the threat matrix.” This was a joke, but Arnie Van Damm mumbled from the end of the table.
“If the press heard a word of that, their heads would explode from excitement.”
Canfield said, “The DEA guys jotted down the tail number. It matches with the helo that crashed off Guatemala.”
Ryan summarized. “So a guerrilla-warfare school was set up by Guatemalan ex-commandos somewhere in the west of El Salvador. Do I need to run down the list of groups that may have been in that school?”
Canfield answered, “Local insurgents, other Central American revolutionaries, South American revolutionaries.”
Murray took over. “Zetas, Gulf cartel, Sinaloa cartel, MS-13—”
Mary Pat reined in the speculation. “Could be any of those things. But this looks like an ad hoc project, and the timing is right to match up with what we know about al-Matari’s movements. For now we have no idea if al-Matari is in our hemisphere and involved with this. But we’re all looking, Mr. President.”
—
The meeting wrapped a few minutes later, and Mary Pat went out into the President’s secretary’s office and retrieved her phone, which she always left in a basket there before going into the Oval. It was a West Wing rule. In offices, conference rooms, pretty much everywhere other than hallways, mobile phones in the West Wing were verboten.
As soon as she stepped into the hall, however, her phone started to ring. She answered without looking.
“Foley.”
“Hi, Mary Pat. It’s Gerry.”
“Funny you should call, Gerry. I was just thinking about you. Well, I should say I was thinking about your excellent private equity management firm.”
Hendley Associates was the front company for The Campus. It was, in fact, a working private equity firm, and i
t even funded Campus operations by the trades it made.
Gerry, however, would be quite certain that Mary Pat wasn’t looking to invest some money. No, she employed The Campus regularly on operations unsuited for any of the agencies under the purview of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. If she was thinking of Hendley’s organization, then she was thinking about espionage.
Gerry said, “Something we can do for you?”
“Not just yet, but I’d wager that pretty soon I’ll be making the drive over to Alexandria for a little chitchat.”
“We’re always ready and waiting. Actually, though, that’s sort of the reason I called. We aren’t as ready as we used to be. As you know, we’ve lost some operational abilities.”
After a pause Mary Pat said, “I think of Sam every day.”
“Yes. So do I. We’ve decided to bring some new blood into the organization, and we’re in the processes of narrowing down some candidates.”
“I’m glad to hear that. How can I be of assistance?”
“There is a name that came forward. Some of my guys have worked with him in the past. He’s currently employed by Jay. Of course I wouldn’t think of making any sort of an approach without your blessing.”
“What’s the name? If I know him I’ll tell you how I feel about him leaving. If I don’t know him, I’ll check him out.”
“His name is Adam Yao.”
Mary Pat’s pause was brief. “Gerry, you know I’d do anything to help your operation out over there. You have become an important part of the IC in the last several years.”
“But?”
“But if you take Adam Yao away from me, I’ll drive over there personally and punch you in the nose.”
Gerry laughed. “He’s that good, huh?”
“He’s one of Jay’s superstars. He’s done things I can’t talk about, not even to you.”
Gerry knew Yao had been involved with operations in Hong Kong and in North Korea, but he didn’t say anything about them. Instead, he said, “You keep Mr. Yao. Sounds like he’s already in a position that is getting the best out of him. Plus, I’m not looking to get a punch in the nose. I’ve had a rough week.”