Locked On

  “Weird,” said Caruso, who’d been silent until now. “If he is SVR, why didn’t he send his own people?”

  Clark answered this quickly. “He wanted to use cutouts to insulate him and his service from this.”

  “So Valentin knows about you through Laska?” asked Ryan.

  “Looks like it.”

  Ryan was confused. “And Laska knows about you … how?”

  Sam Granger answered this. “Paul Laska runs the Progressive Constitution Initiative, the group that is defending the Emir. Somehow the Emir fingered Clark, and Laska is orchestrating this all with Russia because he can’t let on that the Emir is passing intel to him.”

  Hendley ran his fingers through his gray hair. “The Emir may have described Clark to his lawyers. They, somehow, got a picture of you from CIA.”

  “So Paul Laska and his people are using the Russians, running their version of a false-flag operation,” said Clark.

  “But why would the Russians go along with this?” asked Chavez.

  “To hobble the Ryan Presidency, or maybe even kill it outright.”

  “We have to go after Laska,” said Caruso.

  “Hell, no,” Hendley said. “We don’t operate inside America against Americans, even misguided sons of bitches like him.”

  A mild argument broke out in the room, with Caruso and Ryan on one side, and the rest of the men on the other. Chavez stayed out of it for the most part.

  Clark stopped the argument. “Listen, I understand and respect that. I will try to get more information on my end that we can use, and then I will report back.”

  “Thank you,” said Gerry Hendley.

  “There is another situation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A crew coming after me. Not Russians. Not Americans. French. One of them died in Cologne. I didn’t kill him, exactly, but he’s just as dead. Don’t guess his buddies are going to listen to my side of it.”

  The men in the conference room looked at one another for a moment. They had all heard the news about the death of the Frenchman, supposedly at the hands of John Clark. But if Luc Patin was part of a team after Clark, that meant there was another force involved in all this. Finally Rick Bell said, “We’ll try to find out who they are. Maybe we can look into the dead guy a lot closer than the international media has, try and find out who he was working for.”

  Clark said, “I appreciate it. It wouldn’t hurt to know what I’m dealing with on that front. Okay. Got to go. You guys focus on getting Sam back.”

  “Will do,” said Chavez. “Watch yourself, John.”

  When Clark hung up, Dominic turned to Domingo. “Ding, you’ve known Mr. C the longest. He sounded tired, didn’t he?”

  Chavez just nodded.

  “How much longer can he go on? The guy’s what? Sixty-three, sixty-four? Shit. He’s more than twice my age and I’m feeling the effects of everything I’ve been through the past few weeks.”

  Chavez just shook his head as he looked off into the distance. “No point in speculating how long his body can hold up to the day-to-day wear and tear.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you do what John does, sooner or later, you’re going to go out quick. One of the bullets that have been whizzing past his head for damn near a half-century is going to have his name on it. And I’m not talking about that little scratch he got in Paris.”

  Caruso nodded. “I guess we all have an expiration date on us, doing what we do.”

  “Yep. We roll the dice every time we go out.”

  The meeting was breaking up, but the conference room was still full when a call light on the phone console in the center of the table blinked again. Hendley himself picked it up. “Yeah? Good, put him through.” Hendley looked to the men standing around. “It’s al Darkur.”

  He punched the conference button to put the call through the speakers. “Hello, Mohammed. You are speaking to Gerry, and the others are listening in.”

  “Good.”

  “Tell me you have good news.”

  “Yes. We have found your man. He is still in North Waziristan, in a walled compound in the town of Aziz Khel.”

  Chavez leaned over the desk. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I have planned a raid on the compound. At this point I have not asked for approval because I do not want the information to leak out to the men holding him. But I expect the rescue attempt will launch within three days’ time.”

  Chavez asked, “How did you happen to find out about this compound?”

  “The ISI has known about the compound—it is used as a prison for kidnap victims of Siraj Haqqani. But the ISI did not have anyone of value held there, so there was no reason to risk tipping our hand about the existence of our intelligence asset that provided the information. I persuaded someone to tell me.”

  Chavez nodded. “How many gomers you think are there?”

  Al Darkur paused on the other end. “How many what?”

  “Sorry. How many of Haqqani’s people? How much opposition at the compound.”

  A longer pause. “Maybe you would prefer to not know the answer to that question.”

  Chavez shook his head. “I’d rather have bad news than no news. Something I learned from a friend of mine.”

  “I think your friend is very wise. I am sorry that the news is bad. We expect there will be no less than fifty Haqqani fighters billeted within one hundred meters of where Sam is being held.”

  Ding looked at Jack and Dom. Both men just nodded to him. “Mohammed. We’d like to come over as soon as possible.”

  “Excellent. You men proved your talents in Dubai. I could use you again.”

  After the phone conversation with the ISI major, the three Campus operators sat back down at the table. They were joined, again, by Hendley and Granger.

  It was clear that Jack, Dom, and Ding wanted to go to Pakistan, and they wanted to be involved in the raid on the compound where, according to the ISI, Sam Driscoll was being held captive by the Haqqani network.

  Hendley did not want to send them, but as they pled their case he realized he could not deny them the chance to rescue their friend.

  Gerry Hendley had lost his wife and three kids in a car crash, he’d lost Brian Caruso the year before in a Campus mission that he approved, and these facts were not lost on the other men in the room.

  Gerry wanted Sam back as much as or more than anyone else on the team.

  He said, “Men. Right now, like it or not, Clark is on his own. We will support him here, in any way we can, if he checks in with us and requests more help.

  “This opportunity to go after Sam.” Hendley just shook his head. “It sounds like a shit sandwich. It sounds really dicey. But I will never be able to live with myself if I don’t allow you guys the chance to go after him. It is up to the three of you.”

  Chavez said, “We’ll go to Pesh and talk to al Darkur. I trust him. If he says the men who are leading the raid are on the up-and-up … well … that’s about all we can ask for, isn’t it?”

  Hendley agreed to let them go, but he was under no illusions they were just going to feel the situation out. He could tell by the looks in their eyes that these three men would be heading into battle, and he wondered if he could live with himself if they did not come back.

  62

  General Riaz Rehan sent a message to all of the organizations under his control. Not to the leadership of the organizations but to dozens of individual cells. The active units in the field were the men Rehan trusted to do their duty to his cause, and he took the time to spend the day in communication via e-mail, Skype, and sat phone, ordering them all into action.

  India was the target. D-Day was now.

  Attacks began within hours. Along the border between the countries, deep in the Indian interior, even Indian embassies and consulates in Bangladesh and other countries were attacked.

  To those asking “Why now?” the answers varied. Many in the world press blamed President-
elect Jack Ryan for his verbal attacks on the weak Pakistani government, but those in the know could tell the coordination necessary for these actions meant the plans had been in place for some time, long before Ryan promised he would back India if Pakistan did not end its support for terrorism.

  Most people also knew that there was no reason to ask “Why now?” because although the scale of the conflict had increased in the past month, the conflict itself had been going on for decades.

  The operation that Riaz Rehan had put into action in the past months, beginning with the attack on the Electronics City tollway in Bangalore, had come to him in a dream many years before, in May of 1999. At that time, India and Pakistan were in the midst of a brief border skirmish that became known as the Kargil War. Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control between the two nations, small battles raged, and artillery shells crashed down inside the borders of both countries.

  Rehan was there on the border at the time, organizing militant groups in Kashmir. He had heard a rumor, later proven true, that Pakistan had begun readying some of its nuclear arsenal. The Pakistanis had possessed nuclear weapons for more than a decade by this point, although their first test of an atomic weapon had just taken place the year before. They had nearly one hundred warheads and air-to-ground bombs, all kept disassembled but ready for quick assembly and deployment in case of national emergency.

  That night, sleeping in a mountain redoubt straddling the Line of Control, Rehan dreamt nuclear weapons were brought to his hut by a large saker falcon. The saker ordered Rehan to detonate warheads on both sides of the border in order to create an all-out nuclear war between the two nations. He set off the weapons along the border, the war escalated to the cities, and out of the ashes of the radioactive fires Rehan himself emerged as caliph, the leader of the new caliphate of Pakistan.

  Since the night of the dream, he had thought of the falcon and the caliphate each and every day. He did not see his dream as the ruminations of a manipulative mind pulling data out of the real world and spinning it subconsciously into fantasy. No, he saw his dream as a message from Allah—operational orders, just like he would obtain directives from his ISI handlers, and just like he would relay his orders on to the cells under his control.

  Now, thirteen years later, he was ready to put his plan into practice. Operation Saker he called it, in honor of the falcon who came to him in the dream.

  Over time he had seen it become necessary to change the operation somewhat. He realized India, with many, many more nuclear devices than Pakistan and better delivery capabilities, would destroy Pakistan if a true nuclear war broke out. Plus, Rehan realized, India was not preventing Pakistan from becoming a true theocracy. No, Pakistan itself was the impediment—or more precisely, the Pakistani secularists.

  So he decided instead to use the theft of nuclear devices to topple the weak civilian leadership of his country. The citizenry would accept military rule, they had done so many times before, but not if it turned out the ISI or the PDF had stolen the nukes themselves to effect the change in leadership. So Rehan devised a plan to hand off the nukes to some Islamic militant group outside Pakistan, to throw off the scent that the entire operation was an inside job.

  Once the government fell Rehan would take control and he would purge the military of secularists, and he would unleash his force of militant groups on secularists within the citizenry.

  And Rehan would become caliph. Who better than he, after all? He had become, through years of following the orders of others, a one-man conduit between all the Islamic organizations fighting on behalf of the Islamists in the military. Without Rehan, the ISI could not control Lashkar-e-Taiba, they would not have the support of Al-Qaeda that they enjoyed, they would not have the other twenty or so groups doing their bidding, and they certainly would not possess the money and support that they received from Rehan’s personal benefactors in the Gulf States.

  General Rehan was not known in his country at large, he was very much the opposite of a household name, but his return to the PDF and his ascension to department director in the ISI had given him the status he needed to lead a coup against the secular government in charge when the time was right. He would have the support of the Islamists in the Army, because Rehan had the support of the twenty-four largest mujahideen groups in the country. The ISI’s success depended on this large uncoordinated but quite powerful proxy force, and the ISI/PDF leadership had created in their man Rehan something of a necessary link between themselves and their crucial civilian army.

  Rehan was no longer just the cutout. Rehan had, by his work, his intelligence, and his guile, made himself a secret king, and Operation Saker was his route to his throne.

  63

  Domingo Chavez, Dominic Caruso, and Jack Ryan Jr. stepped out of the AS332 Super Puma helicopter and into a freezing cold predawn. Though none of the three men had a clue just where they were as far as a point on a map, they all knew from conversations over the satellite phone with Major al Darkur that they were being transported to an off-limits military base in Khyber Agency run by the Pakistani Defense Force’s Special Service Group. In fact they were in Cherat, some thirty-five miles from Peshawar, in a compound resting at 4,500 feet.

  This commando camp would be the staging ground for the SSG hit into North Waziristan.

  The American men were led by stone-faced hardened soldiers to a shack near a parade ground on a flat stretch of dirt surrounded by lush hills. Here they were offered hot tea and shown racks of gear, woodland-camouflage uniforms in brown and black over green, and black combat boots.

  The men changed out of their civilian dress. Ryan had not worn a uniform since high school baseball; it felt strange and somewhat disingenuous to dress like a soldier.

  The Americans were not given the maroon berets worn by the rest of the SSG men in the compound, but otherwise their dress looked identical to the others in the camp.

  When all three men were decked out in the same kit, another helicopter landed on the helipad. Soon Major al Darkur, himself dressed in identical combat fatigues, stepped into the shack. The men all shook hands.

  The major said, “We have all day to go over the mission. We will attack tonight.”

  The Americans nodded as one.

  “Is there anything at all that you need?”

  Chavez answered for the group: “We’re going to need some guns.”

  The major smiled grimly. “Yes, I believe you will.”

  At eight a.m. the three Campus operatives stood on the base’s rifle range, test-firing their weapons. Dom and Jack were outfitted with the Fabrique Nationale P-90 automatic rifle, a space-age-looking weapon that was excellent for close-quarters combat due to a bull-pup design, which shortened the length of the barrel that extended past the body of the user. This helped an operator move through doorways without telegraphing his movements in advance with a protruding barrel.

  The gun also fired a potent but light 5.7-millimeter x 28-millimeter round from a hearty fifty-round magazine.

  Chavez opted for a Steyr AUG in 5.45-millimeter. It had a longer barrel than the P-90, which made it more accurate at distance, as well as a 3.5x power scope. The Steyr might not have been as good as the P-90 for close-in operations, but Chavez was first and foremost a sniper, and he felt the weapon was a fair trade-off.

  Chavez worked with the two younger men on their rifles, had them practice magazine changes while standing, kneeling, and lying prone, and firing the guns on semiauto and full auto while stationary and on the move.

  They also trained with three different types of grenades they would bring in on the op. Small Belgian mini-frag grenades, M84 stun grenades that delivered an incredible flash and bang after a two-second delay, and a 9-banger stun/distraction device that gave off nine less powerful explosions in rapid succession.

  During a break in the action to reload their mags, Major al Darkur appeared on the far side of the large outdoor range carrying an M4 rifle and a metal can of ammunition. Chavez had his two les
s experienced partners continue while he stepped over to the dark-skinned Pakistani.

  “What are you doing?” Ding asked.

  “I am test-firing my rifle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am going with you.” The major placed Oakley protective glasses over his eyes. “Mr. Sam was my responsibility, and I failed. I will accept responsibility for getting him back.”

  Chavez nodded. “I’m sorry I doubted you before.”

  Al Darkur shrugged. “I do not blame you. You were frustrated about losing your friend. If the situation had been reversed, I would have felt the same outrage.”

  Ding put a gloved hand out, and Mohammed shook it.

  Al Darkur asked, “Your men. How are they?”

  “They are good, but they don’t have much experience. Still, if your commandos occupy the forces at the perimeter, and the three of us move as a team through the compound, then I think we will be okay.”

  “Not three of you. Four of us. I will go inside the compound with you.”

  Now Chavez’s eyebrows rose. “Major, if you are bluffing, you are shit out of luck, because I am not going to turn you down.”

  Mohammed flipped the safety off his rifle and fired five quick shots downrange, each bullet banging against its target, a small iron plate that gave off a satisfying clang. “It is no bluff. I got Nigel and Sam into this. I cannot help Nigel, but perhaps I can help Sam.”

  “You are welcome on my team,” said Chavez, immediately impressed with the Pakistani man’s shooting.

  “And when you have your man back,” al Darkur continued, “I hope your organization will continue its interest in General Rehan. You seem to take him as a serious threat, as do I.”

  “We do, indeed,” admitted Chavez.

  The afternoon in Cherat was spent in a briefing by the Zarrar commandos, the unit that would head into North Waziristan with the Americans. The briefing was led primarily by a captain who explained what everyone should do, and what everyone should see, up until the moment when the Americans went inside the main building, where intelligence reports had indicated the prisoners were being kept.