Locked On

  El Daboussi stopped at a jewelry store; something had caught his eye in a dusty glass display case just inside the wide entrance. Sam continued forward a few yards and then stepped into the shadow of a canvas tent, under which young salesgirls sold chintzy plastic toys and other tourist kitsch. As he waited for his target to move on, he stepped deeper into the shade. He felt he blended well into the scenery, but a teenage girl in a chador saw him and approached with a smile. “Sir, you wanna sunglasses?”

  Shit.

  He just shook his head, and the girl got the message and moved on.

  Sam Driscoll had the ability to intimidate with a glance. An ex-Ranger with multiple tours of duty in the sandbox and beyond, he’d been scooped up by The Campus after an introduction from Jack Ryan Sr. Driscoll had been chased from the military by Justice Department lawyers doing the bidding of a Kealty administration hungry for Sam’s blood after a cross-border incursion into Pakistan left a few too many dead bad guys for Kealty’s taste.

  Driscoll would have been the first to agree that he’d violated those terrorist shitheads’ civil rights by firing a .40-caliber hollow-point into each of their brainpans. But as far as he was concerned, he’d done his job, and no more than what was necessary for his mission.

  Life’s a bitch, and then you die.

  Jack Sr.’s publicity of the Driscoll affair was enough to get the DOJ to drop the matter, but Ryan’s recommendation along with John Clark’s personal appeal to Gerry Hendley had gotten Sam hired into The Campus.

  At thirty-eight, Sam Driscoll was several years older than Dom Caruso, his partner on this op, and even though Sam was in excellent physical condition, he wore his extra mileage on him, manifested in a graying beard, deep-set creases around his eyes, and a nagging old wound to his shoulder that he woke up to each and every morning. The injury had come in a firefight on the exfil during his Pakistan mission; a jihadi’s AK round had shattered a rock in front of Driscoll’s firing position, sending natural shrapnel into and through the Ranger’s upper body.

  The shoulder didn’t bother him so much at the moment, the stiffness and soreness melted away with movement and exercise, and a couple hours of “foot follow” surveillance through Cairo’s Old Town had given him plenty of both today.

  And Driscoll was about to get some more exercise. He looked up and noticed el Daboussi was on the move again. Sam waited for a moment, and then stepped out into the alleyway to resume his tail of the silver-haired terrorist.

  A minute later, Sam stopped again as his target entered a busy kahwah, a boisterous neighborhood coffeehouse ubiquitous in Cairo. Men sat in chairs around small tables that spilled out into the center of the alley; they played backgammon and chess and smoked hookah pipes and cigarettes while drinking thick Turkish coffee or fragrant green tea. El Daboussi and his men walked past these open-air tables and continued deep into the dark room.

  Sam spoke softly into his cuff mike. “Dom, come back?”

  “Yep,” came the reply into Driscoll’s earpiece.

  “Subjects have stopped. They’re in a coffeehouse on …” Sam scanned the walls and corners of the impenetrable market alleyway for a sign. Up and down the souk he saw stalls and canvas-covered kiosks but no signs referencing his exact location. Sam had had a better sense of direction humping through the mountains of Pakistan than he did right here in Cairo’s Old Town. He chanced a surreptitious glance down to his map to get his bearings. “Okay, we just made a left off of Midan Hussein. I think we are still just north of al-Badistand. Say fifty meters from your location. Looks like our boy and his goons are going to sit and chat. How ’bout you come over here and we can split the coverage?”

  “On the way.”

  While Sam waited for his backup, he wandered over to a chandelier shop and gazed appreciatively at a glass light fixture. In the reflection of a large crystal bauble he could see the front of the kahwah well enough to watch it in case his target left. But instead of anyone leaving, he saw three other men step into the kahwah from the opposite direction. Something about the look of the leader of this little pack gave him pause. Driscoll chanced a pass by the entrance, and he looked inside as if he was searching for a friend.

  There, in the back against a stone wall, Mustafa el Daboussi and his men sat at a table right next to the new arrival and his men.

  “Interesting,” Sam said to himself as he wandered off a few yards away from the coffeehouse’s entrance.

  Dom arrived in the alleyway a minute later, shouldered up to Sam as both men picked through the wares of another tiny kiosk. Driscoll leaned over a table and pulled a pair of jeans out of a pile as if to look them over. He whispered to his partner. “Our boy is having a clandestine meet and greet with an unknown subject.”

  Dom did not react; he only turned to a cheap mannequin at the front of the stall and pretended to look at the tag on the vest the mannequin wore. While doing so, he looked past the plastic life-size figure and into the café across the street. Driscoll passed behind him closely. Dom whispered, “It’s about damn time. We’ve been waiting for days.”

  “I hear you. Let’s grab a table at the café across the way, maybe get some pictures of these jokers. We’ll send them back to Rick and see if his geeks can ID them. The one in back looks like he’s in charge.”

  A minute later, the two Americans sat in the shade under an umbrella in the open-air café that faced the kahwah. A waitress in a chador stepped up to the table. Dom took the lead with the ordering, much to the surprise of Sam Driscoll. “Kahwaziyada,” he said with a polite smile, and then motioned to himself and Sam.

  The woman nodded and stepped away.

  “Do I want to know what you just ordered us?”

  “Two Turkish coffees with extra sugar.”

  Sam shrugged, stretched the tight scar tissue of his shoulder wound with a long, slow neck roll. “Sounds pretty good. I could use the caffeine.”

  The coffee came, and they sipped it. They did not look over at their target. If his security detail was any good, they would be evaluating the Westerners sitting across the alley, but probably only for the first couple of minutes. If Sam and Dom were careful to completely ignore them, then el Daboussi, his men, and the three other new arrivals would satisfy themselves that the Westerners were just a couple of tourists, sitting and waiting while their wives shopped the souk for rugs, and there was nothing to be concerned about.

  Even though Sam and Dom were operational and in no small danger here spying on a terrorist, they enjoyed being outside, sipping coffee in the sunlight. For the past few days they’d gone out only at night, and then only in shifts. The rest of the time they’d operated from a studio apartment across from a posh walled residence rented by el Daboussi in the upscale Zamalek neighborhood. They had spent long days and nights peering through scopes, photographing visitors, and eating rice and lamb in quantities that caused both men to no longer be great fans of either rice or lamb.

  But Sam and Dom, as well as their support team back at The Campus, both knew this work was important.

  While Mustafa el Daboussi was Egyptian by birth, he’d been living in Pakistan and Yemen for the past fifteen years or so, working for the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. Now that the URC was in utter disarray due to the disappearance of their leader and a number of recent intelligence successes attributed to the CIA and other agencies, el Daboussi was back home, ostensibly working for the new government in some paper-pushing job in Alexandria.

  But The Campus had learned there was more to this story. Jack Ryan Jr. had been going down the roster of known URC players, trying to find out where they were and what they were doing now, by using both classified and open-source intelligence. It was difficult work, but it had culminated with the discovery that MED, as Mustafa el Daboussi was known at The Campus, had been given a “no show” job by members of the Muslim Brotherhood who held the reins of power in parts of Egypt. Further investigation had indicated that MED had been placed in charge of setting up a pair of train
ing camps near Egypt’s border with Libya. According to classified CIA documents, ostensibly the plan was to have Egyptian intelligence train Libya’s civilian militia into something of a real national defense force.

  But some in the CIA, and everyone at The Campus, thought that was a lie. MED’s history showed he had interest only in supporting terror against infidels; he didn’t seem like a good fit to train a home guard in North Africa.

  So when a coded e-mail from a MED associate’s account was picked up by The Campus saying el Daboussi would spend a week in Cairo meeting with foreign contacts who would be helping him with his new “enterprise,” Sam Granger, the chief of operations, immediately sent Sam Driscoll and Dominic Caruso over to get pictures of whoever came to see MED at his rented house, in hopes of getting a better idea of the real objective of these new camps.

  While the Americans sat at their table and pretended to be nothing more than bored tourists, they talked about the Turkish coffee they were drinking. They agreed that it was incredibly good, even though they had identical stories about accidentally sucking down a mouthful of the bitter grounds that collected in the bottom of the cup the first time they tried it.

  After their coffee was more than half put away, they returned to their operation. One at a time, they took turns glancing into the dim room across the alley. Just nonchalant little eye sweeps at first. After a minute of this, they recognized they were in the clear—none of the six men at the table gave them any unwanted attention.

  Dom pulled his sunglasses case from his jeans and placed it on the table. He opened the top and then pinched the padding and fabric away from the inside of the lid. This revealed a tiny LCD screen, and the screen projected the image being captured by the twelve-megapixel camera secreted into the base of the case. Using his mobile phone, he transmitted a Bluetooth signal to the covert camera. With the signal he was able to increase the zoom on the camera until the LCD monitor displayed a perfectly framed image of the six men at the two tables. As el Daboussi and his two henchmen smoked sheesha and talked to the three men at the next table, Caruso took dozens of digital images through the surreptitious camera on the table by using the photo button on his mobile phone.

  While Dom concentrated on his work, careful not to look like he was concentrating, Sam said, “Those new guys are military. The big guy in the middle, the one with his back to the wall, is a senior officer.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because I was military, and I was not a senior officer.”

  “Right.”

  Driscoll continued. “Can’t explain how I know, exactly, but he’s at least a colonel, maybe even a general. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “He’s not Egyptian, that’s for sure,” said Dom, as he slid the camera back into his pocket.

  Driscoll did not move his head. Instead he studied the coarse, wet grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. “He’s Pakistani.”

  “That was my guess.”

  “We’ve got pictures, let’s not push our luck,” said Sam.

  “Agreed,” replied Dom. “I’m tired of watching other people eat lunch. Let’s go find some food.”

  “Rice and lamb?” asked Sam morosely.

  “Better. I saw a McDonald’s by the metro.”

  “McLamb it is.”

  5

  Jack Ryan Jr. pulled his Hummer into his designated parking space in the lot of Hendley Associates at 5:10 a.m. He struggled to climb out of the big vehicle. His muscles ached; cuts and bruises covered his arms and legs.

  He limped through the back door of the building. He did not like coming in so early, especially considering how beat-up he was this morning. But he had important work that could not wait. At this moment there were four operatives in the field, and although he truly wished he were out there with them, Ryan knew it was his responsibility to provide them the best real-time intelligence he could in order to make their tough work, if not easier, at least not any harder than it needed to be.

  He passed a security man at the reception desk in the go lobby. As far as Jack was concerned, the guard was freakishly awake and alert at this rude hour.

  “Morning, Mr. Ryan.”

  “Hey, Bill.” Normally Ryan didn’t come in until eight, and by then Bill, a retired Air Force Security Force master sergeant, had handed off his post to Ernie. Ryan had met Bill only a couple of times, but he seemed like he was born to do his job.

  Jack Junior took the elevator up, shuffled through the dark hallway, dropped his leather messenger bag off in his cubicle, and headed for the kitchen. There he started a pot of coffee and then reached into the freezer and pulled out an ice pack that had been getting a lot of use of late.

  Back at his desk while the coffee brewed, he lit up his computer and flipped on the lamp. Other than Jack, some IT guys who worked twenty-four/seven, a third-shift analytical/ translation unit, and the security men on the first floor, the building would be dead for at least another hour. Jack sat, held the ice to his jaw, and put his head down on his desk.

  “Shit,” he mumbled.

  Five minutes later, the coffeemaker dripped its last drop into the pot just as Ryan grabbed a mug from the cabinet; he poured steaming black liquid into it and hobbled back to his desk.

  He wanted to go back home and lie down, but that was not an option. The after-hours training Ryan had been going through was kicking his ass, but he knew he wasn’t in any real danger. His colleagues out in the field were the ones in peril, and it was his job to help them out.

  And his tool to help them was his computer. More specifically, it was the data that the parabolic dishes on the roof and the antenna farm of Hendley Associates pulled out of the ether, the data the code breakers and a mainframe supercomputer decoded from the near constant haul of encrypted information. Jack’s daily morning fishing expedition derived its fish from data traffic from CIA in Langley, from the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, from the National Counterterrorism Center at Liberty Crossing in McLean, from the FBI in D.C., and from a host of other agencies. Today he saw he had a particularly large pull to go through even this early in the morning. Much of it was traffic that came to Langley from friendly nations overseas, and this is what he’d arrived early to peruse.

  Jack logged in to the NSA’s Executive Intercept Transcript first. The XITS, or “zits,” would alert him to any big goings-on that he had missed since leaving work at six the previous afternoon. As his screen began filling with data, he took mental stock of what was going on today. The operational tempo, or OPTEMPO, here at The Campus had been going up precipitously in the past few weeks, so Jack found it harder and harder each morning to decide on a starting place for his day’s duties.

  The four Campus operatives out in the field were divided into two teams. Jack Junior’s cousin Dominic Caruso was teamed with ex–Army Ranger Sam Driscoll. They were in Cairo, tailing a Muslim Brotherhood operative who, Jack and his fellow analysts at The Campus had reason to suspect, was doing his best to raise some hell. According to the CIA, the man had been setting up training camps in western Egypt and was purchasing weapons and ammunition from a source in the Egyptian Army. After that … Well, that was the problem. No one had been able to figure out what he was doing with the camps and the guns and the know-how he’d obtained working for the URC and other groups for the past two decades. All they knew was that he and his camps and his guns were in Egypt.

  Jack sighed. Egypt, post-Mubarak. Pre-fucked-up free-fire zone?

  The American media declared as fact that the changes in the Middle East would promote peace and tranquility, but Ryan, The Campus, and a lot of people in the know around the world thought it likely that the changes in the Middle East would usher in not moderation but rather extremism.

  To many in the American media, people who thought such things were pessimists at best, and bigots at worst. Ryan considered himself a realist, and for this reason he didn’t run out into the street to praise the rapid change.

  The extremists were out
in force. With the disappearance of the Emir nearly a year earlier, all over the map the terrorists were shifting safe houses, allegiances, occupations, and even host nations.

  One thing hadn’t changed, though. Ground zero for the entire jihadist movement was still Pakistan. Thirty years ago, all the fledgling jihadists of the world flocked there to fight the Russians. Every male kid in the Islamic world past the age of puberty was offered a gun and an express ticket to paradise. Every boy younger than that was offered a place in a madrassa, a religious school that fed them and clothed them and gave them a community, but the madrassas set up in Pakistan taught only extremist beliefs and war-fighting skills. These skills were handy for the students, as these children were just being made ready to send into Afghanistan to fight the Russians, but the skill sets they’d learned, along with the madrassas’ promotion of jihad, didn’t leave them many options when the Russians left.

  It was inevitable that when the Soviets quit Afghanistan, the hundreds of thousands of armed and angry jihadists in Pakistan would become an incredible thorn in the side of the government there. And it was equally inevitable that these armed and angry jihadists would push into the vacuum that was post-Soviet Afghanistan.

  And thus began the story of the Taliban, which created the safe haven for Al-Qaeda, which brought Western coalition forces over a decade earlier.

  Ryan sipped his coffee, tried to focus his thoughts back on his duties and away from the big geopolitical issues that governed all. When his dad made it back into the White House, then his dad would have all that to worry about. Junior, on the other hand, had to deal with the comparatively tiny day-to-day ramifications of all those big problems. Small stuff, like ID’ing some mutt for Sam and Dom. They had e-mailed him another batch of pictures for him to look at. Pictures including some of the unknown Pakistani who had met with el Daboussi the day before.