09.Deep Black: Death Wave Read online

  CHATEL: I’ll bet that’s not all she’s experienced in.

  FENG: That is irrelevant. If she does consent to share my bed, that will be most pleasant. As I said, it is my preferred hobby.

  “Are you picking it all up?” Lia’s voice said, coming through the speaker in the ceiling.

  “Loud and clear,” Telach told her. “They’re discussing you right now like a piece of meat.”

  “Let them. Anything useful?”

  “Not yet. No … wait. They’re talking about ‘the project’ now.”

  FENG: What progress at the drill site?

  SHAH: Slow. Slow.

  FENG: You are a week behind schedule. Why?

  SHAH: We are drilling through solid basalt, not sediment or sandstone. It takes time.

  CHATEL: We’ve also had to order more replacement drill bits from Dhahran. If they arrive within the next day or two, I expect that we shall be at the five-hundred-meter level by the middle of next week.

  SHAH: The Jackal told me to ask you. When can he expect the special packages?

  FENG: They are en route as we speak. You tell the Jackal that he must have the boreholes complete by next week.

  CHATEL: That will depend on the rock. Basalt is very hard.

  FENG: Tell him. (Strong emphasis.) If they haven’t reached one thousand meters, they’ll have to go with what they have.

  SHAH: We have also had inquiries from Dhahran. Concerned inquiries.

  FENG: About?

  SHAH: When Operation Wrath of God is complete, the Saudis will have lost one of their major trading partners. Mr. al-Khuwaytir is worried about the effect on the global economy.

  FENG: When Wrath of God is complete, the People’s Republic of China will be more than able to step into the vacuum. Mr. al-Khuwaytir should keep in mind that the People’s Republic owns over one-eighth of their foreign debt. Have faith in God.

  SHAH: Do not mock me.

  FENG: I’m not. Do not muddy the water with minor concerns. At this point in time, all of our attention must be focused on completing those boreholes. Your compatriots in Jerusalem are impatient. They want to carry out Operation Fire from Heaven quickly, but they must not, must not, act before Wrath of God is complete. If they do, they risk everything we’ve worked for. Am I understood?

  SHAH: You are understood.

  FENG: And there is another matter, Mr. Shah. I received a message early this morning from one of my sources on La Palma. It seems your people have been conducting intelligence work, wet work, in fact, on your own, without clearing it with me first.

  SHAH: What do you mean?

  FENG: I think you know what I mean. Pender? In the United States?

  SHAH: That was necessary. Pender and Carlylse are too close, they know too much.

  FENG: Killing Pender called attention to him. That was dangerous.

  SHAH: It is not an issue. Pender’s death looked like suicide. Carlylse is on La Palma now, according to our sources. The Jackal will take care of him as well, and it will again look like suicide.

  FENG: Just so the Jackal knows that he must not call attention to Wrath of God in any way. Pender and Carlylse are unimportant. Their books may even help us in the long run. Do not call undue attention to them, or we could lose the, the psychological effect you are looking for within the Muslim world.

  SHAH: The Jackal knows what he is doing, Mr. Feng.

  FENG: I hope so. What’s the matter, Mr. Chatel? You look unhappy.

  CHATEL: I don’t know. What you’re planning, what we’re doing … This is a lot bigger, a lot more, uh, far-reaching than you told me when you asked me to help with this. I’m having some doubts.

  FENG: We are paying you a great deal of money, Mr. Chatel. We are paying you not to have doubts.

  CHATEL: I know, I know.

  FENG: And there will be a lot more money when the project is done. A very great deal of money. So do not doubt.

  CHATEL: The girl is coming back.

  FENG: We’ll talk more later. In my room. (In English.) Ah! Miss Lau! Thank you.

  The conversation turned to more mundane things—COSCO’s profit margin and Feng’s hope to open new markets in Spain. Telach touched a button on her keyboard, then pulled a printout of the conversation from a printer.

  Bill Rubens was going to want to see this, and quickly.

  12

  OFFICE OF DIRNSA

  NSA HEADQUARTERS

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  THURSDAY, 1125 HOURS EDT

  Rubens waited as Lieutenant General Alexander Douglas finished reading the transcript. The director of the NSA had agreed to meet with Rubens on impossibly short notice. Rubens had secured the appointment by using the code word “Armageddon” in his request to Douglas’ secretary. Using that word meant that the subject of the meeting was nothing less than cataclysmic in scope, was an immediate threat endangering the entire nation, and was supremely credible. During Rubens’ eleven-year tenure as deputy director of the NSA and head of Desk Three, the code had been used exactly three times—twice when there’d been solid reports of nuclear weapons smuggled into U.S. ports, and on the morning of 9/11.

  They sat at the small conference table in a private meeting room off Douglas’ office, with the morning sun filtering in through the tinted windows overlooking the sprawl of Fort Meade and the Maryland countryside. Brigadier General Howard Noelle sat to Rubens’ left, the two of them opposite Douglas. Noelle was deputy director of the Central Security Service and, according to the organization charts, the number three man in the Agency.

  The CSS had been established in 1972 as a combat support agency within the Department of Defense. While Douglas double-hatted as chief of the CSS, it was Noelle who actually managed the partnership between the cryptologic elements of the various military services and the NSA. Anything coming over Douglas’ desk flying the Armageddon flag would sooner or later involve the U.S. military, so it was important that Noelle be present as well.

  Douglas adjusted his round-framed glasses and looked up. “Bill … this is pretty raw. An overheard conversation in Spain? There’s not a lot to go on here.”

  “This may be the break we’re looking for, sir,” Noelle said. He’d already read the transcript and discussed the high points with Rubens during their twenty-minute wait to see Douglas. “A solid link between Operation Haystack and a terrorist plan to attack the United States.”

  “Yes … but how? What’s the target? According to this, there’s a … a shipment of something going somewhere, but no indication of where. And we don’t know for certain that ‘the shipment’ is comprised of the missing suitcase nukes.”

  “Actually, sir,” Rubens said, “General Noelle is right. We have a pretty strong case here.”

  “Would you care to enlighten me?”

  “Of course. In the transcript, Feng mentions something called Operation Fire from Heaven. In Arabic, that’s Nar-min-Sama. We’ve been chasing that one since our friends in the Mossad tipped us off a couple of weeks ago. We think it may refer to a planned nuclear strike against Israel.”

  “Yes …”

  “Feng links that with another operation, Harakat Radab min Allah. Operation Wrath of God. Feng is insisting here that Fire from Heaven be delayed until well after Wrath of God is implemented. It sounds like a two-tiered attack.”

  “Hit one target, then take out the second while the opposition is still reeling from the effects of the first,” Noelle put in.

  “A diversion?”

  “Possibly,” Rubens said. “From the tone Feng is taking here, it sounds like two different attacks by two different groups on two different targets, but either the chances of the second will be improved if the other attack is launched first, or launching the second attack too early will give something away, maybe make the first attack less effective.”

  “It still sounds pretty thin,” Douglas said. “We have to know the target.”

  “Feng also mentions a name, a nom de guerre, al-Wawi. The Jackal.�
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  “Carlos the Jackal? Big-name terrorist in the seventies? Isn’t he dead?”

  “He’s serving a life sentence in Clairvaux Prison, in France, sir. We checked as soon as the name popped up.”

  The original Jackal had been the rather pathetic, overweight Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan leftist revolutionary who’d made a name for himself back in the 1970s. Several names, in fact. He’d become known as “Carlos” when he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A British newspaper, the Guardian, had nicknamed him “the Jackal” when The Day of the Jackal, a novel by thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, was found with his belongings.

  In fact, Carlos had fallen far short of the myth-making and hype and was not at all the super-assassin of fiction. His most notorious escapades had been a raid on an OPEC conference in Vienna where three people had been killed, and a later string of bombings in France and Germany. The man eventually had been abducted by his own security guards in Sudan, then turned over to French intelligence, and was now in prison.

  “So this is a new Jackal,” Douglas said, thoughtful.

  “Yes, sir.” Rubens opened his briefcase and extracted a file folder, which he opened and passed to Douglas. “This is al-Wawi, the new Jackal. Ibrahim Hussain Azhar. He led a team of Mujahideen in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines A300 Airbus in 1999. The aircraft was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where it was closely guarded by the Taliban.

  “After a standoff lasting seven days, India released three prisoners to secure the Airbus and its passengers. Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And Maulana Masood Azhar.”

  “Azhar?”

  “Yes, sir. Ibrahim Azhar’s brother. A radical Muslim cleric who went on to found Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad, in 2000.”

  “The JeM is just involved with Kashmir, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, but they’ve increasingly been taking an international stance. Especially since they bombed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi.” That had been in December of 2001.

  Kashmir was the disputed territory currently divided between Pakistan, India, and China. Since their original partition in 1947, three wars had been fought in the region between India and Pakistan, the most recent in 1999, and a fourth war had been fought between India and China over the northeastern area in 1962. A number of extremist Muslim groups like the JeM had been created over the years—usually with help from Pakistan’s ISI—with the goal of forcing the Indians out of Kashmir and Jammu, the southern portion of the region now controlled by New Delhi.

  “The Army of Mohammad has been closely tied to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda since the beginning,” Rubens went on. “Especially through the Binoria Madrasah, in Karachi. The message preached there calls for global jihad, claiming it’s the duty of all Muslims everywhere to join together and destroy both Israel and the United States. Kashmir is just a first step toward an Islamic world state.”

  “Well, we’ve heard that before,” Douglas said. “There are too many internal differences for the Muslims ever to get their act together and take on the whole world. Shi’ites against Sunnis. Radicals against conservatives. Different interpretations of the Qur’an. It’ll never happen.”

  “Not unless someone comes up with a really dramatic demonstration,” Rubens observed. “Something that proves how powerful the extremist arm of Islam actually is. Or … maybe a high-profile demonstration of how powerful Allah is. I remember there were concerns that there might be a global jihad in the wake of 9/11. That attack, the sheer scope of it, proved the radical extremists could hurt even a giant like the United States.”

  “The bastards were dancing in the streets from Morocco and Great Britain all the way to Indonesia,” Noelle said sourly.

  “But the more moderate Muslims, the Islamic mainstream, they didn’t join in,” Douglas pointed out. “There was no global uprising.”

  “Which makes me wonder about these operations we’ve tapped into,” Rubens told him. “Wrath of God. Fire from Heaven. Tactical nuclear weapons, maybe planted in a dozen different cities? That kind of widespread destruction might be just the universal rallying cry the extremists are looking for. Something to make all good Muslims see that the triumph of the extremists is inevitable. It is God’s will.”

  “Possibly.” Douglas didn’t sound convinced. He tapped the transcript lying on the desk. “You think Feng is suggesting a timetable when he says the drilling has to be done next week?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay. Drilling where? By whom?” He looked at Noelle and chuckled. “We don’t have any reports of covert drilling operations on the Mall in downtown Washington, do we?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, sir.”

  “He mentions drill bits from Dhahran. And these two people he was meeting with, Shah and Chatel. What’s their part in it?”

  “Shah is a minor executive with Saudi Aramco. That’s the largest oil company in the world. And Chatel is a salesman with Petro-Technologique, a French company that provides specialized drilling equipment to, among others, Saudi Aramco. He mentions drilling through basalt, though. You don’t generally find oil beneath basalt, sir. That’s volcanic rock. You find oil in pockets beneath sedimentary rock, and ocean sediments.”

  “You think they’re drilling holes for suitcase nukes? Underground detonations? Why? Setting the things off on the surface in the middle of a city would be more destructive, I would think. One-kiloton tactical nukes wouldn’t make much of a bang at the bottom of an oil well.”

  “We’re still studying that one, sir,” Rubens said. “I suspect they have something bigger in mind than just wrecking twelve city centers.”

  “But you don’t know what.”

  “No, sir. But we do have one more clue.”

  “The writers Feng mentions. Pender and … who?” Douglas picked up the transcript and scanned through it quickly.

  “Carlylse, sir,” Rubens said. “Vincent Carlylse. And Jack Pender.”

  “Who the hell are they?”

  “A writing team. They’ve coauthored seven books over the past three years. Weird, fringe-element stuff, mostly, but pretty popular. Ancient astronauts, UFOs, the lost continent of Atlantis, stuff like that.” He handed another file across to Douglas. “Yesterday, Pender was found dead in a motel room in New Jersey. It looked like suicide, but the police are calling his death suspicious.”

  “Suspicious how?”

  “A few hours after they found Pender, they found a prostitute dead in another motel, a few miles away. Cynthia Jane Cramer. Naked, tied to the bed, and strangled with a length of rope. Looked like one of her johns got too rough. Her purse was there. The cash was gone, so it looked like a robbery, but whoever it was didn’t take the credit cards. When the police checked, it turned out that one of the cards belonged to Pender.”

  “Ah …”

  “We’re exploring the possibility that the bad guys used Cramer to get access to Pender’s room. She set him up, stole the credit card … and still had it when the bad guys killed her later, just to wrap up the loose ends.”

  “They killed Pender and made it look like suicide.”

  “Yes, sir. Pender was more or less successful. A book he and Carlylse wrote together about Atlantis actually hit the bestseller lists, which is pretty unusual for that kind of pseudo-science book—and he was scheduled to appear on a TV talk show broadcast out of New York City yesterday afternoon.”

  “In other words, he had no reason to kill himself.”

  “I’m told that between divorces, depression, and alcoholism, writing novels is a pretty high-risk profession—but Pender was doing well. Plenty of money in the bank, and the promise of more to come. Pender and Carlylse had just come out with another hot title, this one on 2012. In fact, he was going to be plugging it on that TV show.”

  “So how is this guy connected with the Army of Mohammad?”

  “We’re not entirely sure yet, sir. But yesterday afternoon, GCHQ intercepted an enco
ded cell phone transmission from Masood Azhar, in Karachi, to al-Wawi. When we ran it through crypto, it said that Pender was dead, and that Carlylse was on La Palma, in the Canary Islands. It also said that Carlylse should be dealt with next.”

  “Good God. But why two scribblers? Why these two?”

  “We have an analysis team going through their books now, sir, looking for a motive. Most of their stuff is pretty far out, alien abductions and crap like that. But that newest book, the one they wrote on 2012, might turn out to be the key.”

  “Really? Twenty twelve. That’s … all of that doomsday stuff, right?”

  “Yes, sir. The end of the ancient Mayan calendar and the end of the world. It sounds apocalyptic enough that al-Qaeda or the JeM might have taken an interest.”

  “So why kill the authors?”

  “We’re not sure about that either, yet. In the conversation our operative bugged yesterday, Feng was concerned that their deaths might give away the game. So we’re researching their books with that in mind.”

  Douglas nodded. “I see why you’re concerned. Twelve loose tactical nukes, two extremist Muslim operations with apocalyptic code names, and a murdered author who writes about doomsday. And Feng here is talking about next week.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s the Chinese role in all of this?”

  “Probably opportunistic. In the transcript, Shah mentions concerns that Saudi Arabia is going to lose a major trading partner. Looking at the context, that could well be the United States. Al-Khuwaytir is probably Mohammad Sayeed al-Khuwaytir, the Saudi foreign trade minister. Feng points out that the PRC could step into the vacuum. If Wrath of God is designed to cripple the U.S. economically somehow, I can see how the Saudis would be concerned.”

  “No more solid silver Rolls-Royces.”

  “And another bad stretch for the global economy,” Rubens pointed out. “We’re just climbing out of one economic crisis. Something on the scale these guys are talking about might put the whole world into a financial tailspin. Again, we’re still carrying out the investigation, but we think that Feng was the money man. Best guess? He provided the money for JeM to buy twelve stolen suitcase nukes from the Russian mafiya.”