Locked On

  “That sounds great. Will it be just you, or will your Secret Service detail be coming with us?”

  “I don’t have protection.”

  “Okay, just checking.”

  She was teasing him, and he liked it. He said, “That doesn’t mean I won’t have my dad’s detail check you out thoroughly before our date.”

  She laughed. “Bring it on. It can’t be any worse than going through the TS-SCI process.” She was referring to the CIA vetting process that took months and involved interviews with everyone from neighbors to elementary school teachers.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven?”

  “Seven’s fine. We can actually walk from my place.”

  “Great. See you then.”

  “Looking forward to it,” Melanie said.

  Jack hung up the phone, stood, and smiled at Wills. Tony stood and high-fived his young coworker.

  Paul Laska stood on the long balcony of the Royal Suite of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London, and he looked out over Hyde Park below.

  It was a cool morning in October, but certainly no cooler than it would be back in Newport. Paul had come alone, with only his personal assistant Stuart, his secretary Carmela, his dietitian Luc, and a pair of Czech-born security officers who traveled with him wherever he went.

  That’s what passed for “alone” in the life of a high-profile billionaire.

  The other man on the balcony really had come alone. Yes, there was a time, years before, when Oleg Kovalenko would have been flanked by guards everywhere he went. He had been KGB, after all. A case officer in several Soviet satellites in the sixties and seventies. Not a particularly high-riser in the KGB, but he’d retired as rezident, the KGB’s equivalent to a CIA station chief, even though he was only rezident of Denmark.

  After retirement, Oleg Kovalenko returned home to Russia to live a quiet life in Moscow. He’d rarely traveled out of the country since, but an insistent phone call the day before put him on a jet to London, and now here he sat, feet up on a chaise longue, his thick, soft body tired from the travel, but enjoying the first of what he hoped would be many excellent mimosas.

  Laska watched the morning Knightsbridge commuters file below him and waited for the old Russian to break the ice.

  It did not take long. Kovalenko had always hated uncomfortable silence.

  “It is good to see you again, Pavel Ivanovich,” Kovalenko said.

  Laska’s only reply was a quiet sardonic smile that was delivered toward the park in front of him, and not to the big man on his right.

  The heavy Russian continued, “I was surprised that you wanted to meet like this. It is not so public here, really, but others could be watching.”

  Now Laska turned to the man on the chaise longue. “Others are watching me, Oleg. But no one is watching you. No one cares about an old Russian pensioner, even if you once wielded some power. Your delusions of grandeur are quite childish, actually.”

  Kovalenko smiled, sipped his morning drink. If he was offended by the insult, he made no show of it.

  “So, how can I help you? This is, I am guessing, about our good old times together? You feel the need to settle something from our past?”

  Laska shrugged. “I left the past behind. If you haven’t done that yet yourself, you are an old fool.”

  “Ha. That is not how it worked for we Russians. The past left us behind. We were more than willing to remain there.” He shrugged, drained his mimosa and immediately began looking around for a fresh one. “Tempus fugit, as they say.”

  “I need a favor from you,” Laska said.

  Kovalenko stopped searching for a drink. Instead he looked to the Czech billionaire, then he climbed out of the chaise and stood with his hands on his wide hips. “What could I possibly have that you need, Pavel?”

  “It’s Paul, not Pavel. It has not been Pavel for forty years.”

  “Forty years. Yes. You turned your back on us a long time ago.”

  “I never turned my back on you, Oleg. I was never with you in the first place. I was never a devotee.”

  Kovalenko smiled. He understood completely, but he pressed. “Then why did you help us so eagerly?”

  “I was eager to get out of there. That’s all. You know that.”

  “You turned your back on us, just as you turned your back on your own people. Some would suggest you have turned yet again, turning away from the capitalism that made you in the West. Now you support everything that is not capitalism. You are quite a dancer for an old man. Just the same as when you were young.”

  Laska thought back to when he was young, in Prague. He thought back to his friends in the movement, his initial support of Alexander Dubček. Laska also thought about his girlfriend, Ilonka, and their plans to get married after the revolution.

  But then he thought of his arrest by the secret police, the visit to his cell by a big, powerful, and dominant KGB officer named Oleg. The beating, the threats of imprisonment, and the promise of an exit visa if the young banker only informed on a few of his fellow rabble-rousers in the movement.

  Pavel Laska had agreed. He saw it as an opportunity to go to the West, to New York City, to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and to make a great deal of money. Kovalenko turned him with this enticement, and Laska had helped turn the tide against the Prague Spring.

  And inside of two years the traitor was in New York.

  Paul Laska shook Pavel Laska out of his mind. Ancient history. “Oleg. I am not here to see you. I need something else.”

  “I am going to let you pick up the check for my lovely room downstairs, I am going to let you reimburse me for my flight, I am going to drink your Champagne, and I am going to let you speak.”

  “Your son, Valentin, is SVR. High-ranking, higher than you ever made it in the KGB.”

  “Apples to oranges. Very different times. A very different industry.”

  “You don’t seem surprised that I know about Valentin.”

  “Not at all. Everything can be bought. Information as well. And you have the money to buy everything.”

  “I also know that he is assistant rezident in the UK.”

  Oleg shrugged. “You would think that he’d call on his old father when he learned that I was here. But no. Too busy.” Kovalenko smiled a little. “I remember the life, though, and I was too busy for my father.”

  “I want to meet Valentin. Tonight. It must be in complete secrecy. He is to tell no one of our appointment.”

  Oleg shrugged. “If I can’t get him to see me, his dear father, how can I persuade him to see you?”

  Laska just looked at the old man, the KGB officer who beat him in Prague in 1968, and he delivered his own blow. “Apples to oranges, Oleg Petrovich. He will see me.”

  31

  General Riaz Rehan launched the opening volley of his Operation Saker with a phone call over a voice-over-Internet line with a man in India.

  The man had many aliases, but forever more he would be known as Abdul Ibrahim. He was thirty-one, thin and tall, with a narrow face and deep-set eyes. He was also the operational chief for Lashkar-e-Taiba in southern India, and October 15 would be the last day of his life.

  His orders had come in a phone call from Majid just three nights earlier. He’d met Majid several times before at a training camp in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, and he knew the man to be a high-ranking member of the Pakistani Army and a commander in the ISI. The fact that Ibrahim did not know that Majid’s real name was Riaz Rehan was unimportant, as unimportant as the fact that the four other men who would go on this mission did not know the other aliases of Abdul Ibrahim.

  Ibrahim and his cell had been operating in the Karnataka region of India for some time. They were no sleepers; they’d bombed a railroad exchange, four electrical power stations, and a water treatment facility, and they’d shot a policeman and firebombed cars in front of a television station. For LeT it was small-time stuff, but Abdul Ibrahim had been ordered by Majid to perform harassing operations against the populati
on in a manner that would not put his cell into too much jeopardy. He’d long assumed he was being kept safe and in place for a major operation, and when Majid called him on his voice-over Internet line three days prior, it had been the proudest moment of Abdul Ibrahim’s life.

  Following orders received in the phone call, Abdul Ibrahim had picked his five best operators, and they all met at their safe house in Mysore. Ibrahim appointed one of the men his successor as chief of operations. The young man was shocked to be told he would be in charge of Lashkar-e-Taiba ops in southern India in two-days’ time. The other four men felt lucky to be told they would be going with Abdul on a martyrdom operation in Bangalore.

  They took the best weapons from the cache: four grenades, ten homemade pipe bombs, and a pistol and rifle for each of the five men. This along with nearly two thousand rounds of combined ammunition they packed into backpacks and suitcases along with a change of clothing. Within hours they were on a train to the northeast, and they arrived in Bangalore early in the morning of their second-to-last day.

  A local man with Pakistani roots met them, took them to his home, and handed them the keys to three motorcycles.

  Riaz Rehan himself had picked the target. Bangalore is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India. With a population of six million, it possesses many of the largest technology companies in the huge nation, many located in Electronics City, a 330-acre industrial park in the western suburbs of Bangalore—more precisely in Doddathogur and Agrahara, former villages that had been swallowed up with the explosion of both population and progress here.

  Rehan felt that Abdul Ibrahim and his four men would be slaughtered relatively quickly if they attacked this target. Electronics City had good security for a nongovernmental installation. But still, any success at all by Abdul Ibrahim and his men would send a symbolic message. Electronics City was a major outsourcing hub of India and the operations run from offices there involved hundreds of companies, large and small, around the world. Blowing up people and property here would affect, to one degree or another, many of the Fortune 500 companies, and this would ensure that the attack would have a huge amount of play in the Western media. Rehan reasoned that a single death here by the southern India cell of LeT would carry the value of twenty deaths of peasants in a Kashmiri village. He intended for Abdul Ibrahim’s act in Bangalore to create a thunderclap of terror that would reverberate across the globe and frighten the West, ensuring that India would not be able to downplay such an attack.

  More attacks would follow, and with each attack the conflict between India and Pakistan would worsen.

  Riaz Rehan understood all this because he was a Westernized jihadist, an army general, and an intelligence chief. All these titles attributed to just one man gave him another, more ominous identity—Riaz Rehan, aka Majid, was, above all, a master terrorist.

  When Abdul Ibrahim and his four men arrived in Bangalore and fueled up their motorbikes, they immediately began reconnaissance on their target, because they had no time to waste. They found that the industrial park was covered with heavily armed security, both private guards and police. Further, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Indian paramilitary force in charge of government industrial installations, airports, and nuclear site security, was now working under contract for certain well-heeled private businesses in Electronics City. The CISF had even established checkpoints at the entrance to the industrial park. Ibrahim was certain he and his men would not be able to breach any of the major buildings themselves. He was dejected, but nevertheless he decided to spend much of the time until the attack driving around the perimeter of Electronics City, searching for a way in.

  He did not find a way in, but on the final morning, just hours before his planned attack, he decided to pass by his target one last time in daylight. He traveled alone on his motorcycle along the Hosur Main Road, took the huge, modern Bangalore Elevated Tollway, a ten-kilometer flyover that ran between Madiwala and Electronics City, and he immediately found himself surrounded by dozens of buses packed with workers heading to their jobs from Bangalore proper.

  Instantly he saw his mission before him. Abdul Ibrahim returned to the safe house in the city and told his men that the plans had changed.

  They did not attack that night as he’d promised Majid. He knew his handler would be furious with him for disobeying a direct order, but he obeyed his other order and made no contact with his handler, nor any other LeT asset. Instead he destroyed his mobile phone, prayed, and went to sleep.

  He and his men awoke at six a.m. They prayed again, drank tea in silence, and then climbed aboard the three motorcycles.

  They arrived at the flyover at eight a.m. Abdul rode his own bike two hundred meters behind the second motorcycle, which itself was two hundred meters behind the first. He carried the pipe bombs and grenades in his backpack slung on his chest to where he could reach into the bag and pull them out while he drove.

  The first bike pulled alongside an articulated bus with fifty passengers inside. As the driver of the motorcycle advanced slowly along the long, two-sectioned vehicle, the rider pulled an AK-47 from a bag in his lap, its wire stock folded to shorten its length. The gunman calmly and carefully lined his sights up on the side of the bus driver’s head, and he pressed the trigger. With a short pop and a burst of gray smoke, the bus driver’s window shattered and the man tumbled out of his seat, and the huge bus careened sharply to the right and then jackknifed. It hit several other cars as it skidded at speed, then it slammed into the concrete wall of the flyover, striking more cars that had pulled quickly off the road in an attempt to get out of the way.

  Some in the bus died in the crash, but most were merely wounded after having been thrown from their seats. The first motorcycle moved on, leaving the wounded bus behind as it continued up the road, attacking more vehicles in its path.

  But the second motorcycle, also carrying a driver and a gunman, passed by the crash thirty seconds later. The rear rider’s AK barked, and his seventy-five-round drum spun, releasing its supersonic bullets through the barrel. The rounds tore into the bus and into the wounded, killing the men and women as they tried in vain to scramble free of the wreckage, and killing those in other vehicles who had pulled over to help.

  This second bike, too, rolled on, leaving the carnage behind as the rear gunner reloaded and prepared to attack the next scene of horror up the flyover.

  But Abdul Ibrahim arrived at the articulated bus and the wreckage around it just moments later. He pulled up in the middle of the slaughter, just like dozens of other cars, vans, and motorcycles had done. The thin Lashkar-e-Taiba operative took a pipe bomb from his satchel, lit it with a lighter, and rolled it under a small Volkswagen bus that was parked in the jam, and then he drove away quickly.

  Seconds later the VW exploded, the hot metal and shattered glass tore through the traffic jam, and fire ignited leaking gas from the articulated bus. Men and women burned alive across the two southbound lanes of the flyover as the Lashkar cell continued on, a rolling three-stage attack along the raised toll road.

  They continued on like this for several kilometers; the first two bikes poured automatic weapons fire into moving busses, the vehicles stopped suddenly, careened left or right, many crashed into cars and trucks. Ibrahim cruised slowly and calmly through the wreckage left behind by his comrades, pulled to a stop next to one bus after another, smiled grimly at the screams and moans from inside the wreckage, and tossed in grenades and pipe bombs.

  Twenty-four-year-old Kiron Yadava was driving himself to work that morning because he had missed his carpool. A jawan (enlisted soldier) with the Central Industrial Security Force, he worked the day shift as a patrolling constable at Electronics City, an easy job after two years of service deployed in a paramilitary unit. Normally he packed into a van with six of his mates at a bus stop in front of the Meenakshi Temple for the ride across town to work, but today he was running late and, consequently, traveling alone.

  He had just paid his toll
to get on the flyover, and he pushed the accelerator on his tiny two-seater Tata nearly down to the floorboard to climb the ramp to the restricted access road that traveled to Electronics City. As he drove he listened to a CD in his stereo, the riffs of Bombay Bassment were jacked up full volume, and he rapped along with the MC at the top of his lungs.

  The track ended as Kiron merged into the thick traffic, and the next song had just begun, a thumping electronic reggae-infused dance beat. When the young man heard a low whump whump that seemed to defy the rhythm, he looked at his stereo. But when he heard it again, louder than the music coming through his speakers, he looked into his rearview mirror, and he saw black smoke rising from a dozen sources on the flyover behind him. The nearest plume was just a hundred yards back, and he saw a flaming minibus in the far right-hand lane.

  Constable Yadava saw the motorcycle a moment later. Just forty meters away, two men rode a yellow Suzuki. The rear rider held a Kalashnikov, and he fired it from the hip at a four-door sedan that then sideswiped a bus as it swerved to escape the hot lead.

  Yadava could not believe the images in his rearview mirror. The motorcycle streaked closer and closer to his tiny car, but Constable Yadava just kept driving, as if he were watching an action show on television.

  The Suzuki bike passed by his car. The rider was hooking a fresh mag into his AK, and he even made eye contact with Yadava in his tiny two-seater, before the pair of terrorists wove in front of other cars and out of view.

  The CISF jawan heard more shooting behind him now, and finally he reacted to the action. The Tata pulled off the road on the left, just ahead of another car that had done the same. Yadava climbed out, then reached back in, grabbing his work bag. After unzipping the bag he reached in, his fingers felt past his plastic lunch container and his sweater, and they wrapped around the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun that he carried while on duty. He grabbed his weapon as close rifle fire and incessant honking of horns assaulted his ears.