Gauntlet (3 page)

Many of them continued to wonder about Turbee, though. His messiness, his proclivity to bring food into his workspace without eating it, his pale features, and his unusual repetitive motor mannerisms all puzzled them. One day, however, Turbee showed the team why he was there. On that day, at 7:34am, Madrid time, unknown terrorists detonated explosives on four trains in that city, using cell phone transmissions. More than 200 people were killed, and 1,500 were injured. It was the worst terrorist action that Spain had ever experienced. The bombings occurred during a national election, so the Spanish government immediately blamed the ETA, a Basque separatist organization. The matter was front and center in the PDB the next morning in Washington, and was vigorously discussed during the TTIC morning meeting.

The man leading the discussion was Liam Rhodes. Rhodes, age 45, came from a family that had a history with the CIA—his sure ticket into the Intelligence world, if he wanted to take it. He was a West Point graduate, a former Marine, a Desert Storm vet, and a scholar. After leaving the Marines, he had been admitted to Harvard, where he had obtained a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies in a record three years. After taking time off to handle some family issues, he had re-entered the Intelligence arena as an analyst in the CIA’s Middle East Department. Within ten years, as his skills, intelligence, and education showed through, he was promoted to Director of that department. From there he had been appointed to TTIC.

“No way,” he was saying. “It’s al-Qaeda. The organization of it. The audaciousness. No way the ETA could pull something like this off. One bomb, maybe, but not all of this, and certainly not simultaneously.”

Rather than paying attention to the discussion, Turbee was noodling his way along the Internet, not really following the thread of the conversation. An article had just appeared in one of the Spanish newspapers, stating that an unexploded bomb had been found, and that it had an unusual detonator—a Goma-2 ECO.

Turbee smiled; this was way more interesting than what was going on in the office. He immediately started looking into which corporation produced these detonators. Having determined the culprit, he took a few minutes to hack into its corporate database, and discovered that 20 such detonators had recently been purchased by a numbered company registered in the Cayman Islands. That got his attention. People using numbered companies in the Caymans were generally doing something that they wanted to keep hidden. Like purchasing detonators for bombs they meant to use. Using the power of Blue Gene, he was able to hack into the corporate registry of the Grand Cayman records system, and found the only listed director of that numbered company to be a person from Morocco, by the name of Abu Dujan al-Afghani. Running this man’s name through a Madrid street address database, and further databases for power and telephone service, Turbee found that al-Afghani and one James Zoughan lived across the hall from one another in an apartment building in Madrid. Further searches on the supercomputer revealed that these two individuals had been living side by side in various other buildings in Madrid for the past two years.

Turbee sat back in his chair and considered. If you live beside a terrorist once, that’s a coincidence. If you live beside him three times, in the same city, over a space of two years, that smacks of conspiracy. These two were connected. Using his personal web-bots, which could hack into a server, scour its contents, and send back anything they found, Turbee teased the names of 12 likely conspirators from the various databases to which he had access. Then he stepped it up—he got their current addresses as well. Just as the group meeting was about to finish up, Turbee gingerly raised his hand.

“This ain’t school, Turbee. You can say what you want,” Dan snapped.

In a quiet and somewhat shaky voice, Turbee answered, “It is al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Afghani, the mastermind, claims elsewhere that he is al-Qae-da’s military chief in Europe. His coworkers in this bombing were James Zoughan and twelve 12 others.” Then he gave their names.

The rest of the TTIC team looked at him in astonishment. “How the hell did you get that so fast?” one man asked slowly.

Turbee slowly explained his process, looking down at his shoes to keep from meeting anyone’s eye.

“Get it down on paper,” said Dan. “We need to get that to the President right now.”

“I don’t do paper,” replied Turbee. “Someone else can write it down. Oh, and I’ve got their addresses too.”

With one phone call, Dan was connected to the President’s Chief of Staff, and, after a few tense seconds, he found himself talking to the President of the United States. He gave him the names and addresses of the conspirators.

“How sure are you of this information, Danny?” asked the President. “It’s this odd whiz kid I’ve got, named Turbee. He used his search algorithms to work the information out of literally hundreds of databases. He explained it to the team. Rhodes is convinced Turbee’s got it. I would say it’s pretty reliable, sir,” Dan answered.

“OK, Dan. I’m going to run with it. If we miss it’s going to be embarrassing, but if you’ve nailed it, Spain will owe us.”

The President put down his phone and asked for his Chief of Staff. “Get me Acedo on the line as well,” he ordered. Acedo was the prime minister of Spain, and currently in the midst of an election battle. Within five minutes the call was put through, and the President delivered to Acedo the names and addresses of his terrorists.

It took Acedo and his government several hours to retract their Basque terrorist theory, but in due course they acted on the tip, and arrested the terrorists who hadn’t yet committed suicide. For the subsequent press release, the Spanish security service indicated that a telephone belonging to Zoughan had been found, and that a quick search of the recent phone calls had revealed the names of the other terrorists. That was easier and less embarrassing than saying that some kid with a foreign supercomputer had tweaked out the names in 20 minutes just to pass the time. Even though TTIC was never acknowledged, and Acedo never publicly thanked the US government, word of the coup spread rapidly through the normally tightlipped Intelligence Community.

On that day, Turbee made his bones with the TTIC team. Despite his many eccentricities and blemishes, he was adopted and accepted. For the first time, he learned what it was to be at home in an organization and with other people.

J
OHNSON, turn up the sound on the CNN feed for a second,” barked Dan. Ted Johnson was the custodian of the master controls, in charge of deciding what image or feed went to which of the big 101 screens. He also managed the conference room’s phone lines. The TTIC staff had nicknamed him “the yellee,” due to the fact that he was almost always addressed by Dan in a somewhat elevated tone of voice.

“OK,” Johnson answered.

It took only seconds for everyone in the room to tune in to the events taking place in Libya. On the central 101, a CNN reporter was in the middle of an interview with a demolitions expert on the US mainland. “How big will the explosion be?” asked the announcer. “How big a crater?”

“I can’t say for sure,” said the expert. “But I agree with the Army representative—this explosion could be the equivalent of firing a kiloton of TNT. It could level any block in New York City. It could create a crater, in my opinion, of more than 500 meters across, and deeper than 20 meters.”

The reporter moved on to talk about the odds makers in Vegas, and the rapidly growing pool of cash to be paid to the participant who most accurately called the depth and diameter of the crater. A sly grin slid across Turbee’s usually serious face. He turned to his computer and went to work.

I
NSPECTOR INDERJIT SINGH, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was watching the same CNN feed on a small, 20-year-old television set. He sat alone in his cramped office at the RCMP provincial headquarters on Heather Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, shaking his head in disbelief. “Tons,” he muttered to himself. “Almost 660
tons
of Semtex. And now they’re betting on the size of the crater. Nuts. Totally nuts.” Indy, as he was affectionately nicknamed by the other denizens of the cramped complex, went back to the problem at hand.

British Columbian marijuana, known on the streets of California as “BC Bud,” was pouring across the border separating Canada and her southern neighbor in record quantities. There seemed to be no stopping it. The border was evidently full of holes. Millions of dollars were being spent by four different levels of government, namely British Columbia, the state of Washington, and the two Federal governments, to stop the flow. With no success on either side. A tidal wave of pot, thought Indy. A veritable tsunami.

The source of the drugs was, to the dismay of Indy and many of his colleagues, transparently obvious. After four decades of lax marijuana laws, minor or nonexistent sentences, budget cuts, and a local government that did not seem to care, BC had developed a fruitful and potent marijuana crop. A local economist had suggested, on the basis of fairly reliable evidence, that the marijuana industry had replaced the forest industry as BC’s number-one exporter. Marijuana was freely smoked on the streets of downtown Vancouver every day. A number of restaurants and “hemp shops” were openly selling it. To Indy’s utter amazement, a local TV broadcaster had aired interviews with the proprietors of those establishments, even giving their street addresses. Still nothing had been done.

Many of Indy’s colleagues knew judges, prosecutors, and high government officials who made no secret about the fact that they smoked weed. The drug children of the ’60s and ’70s were now holding the levers of power, and they saw nothing wrong with smoking marijuana. Not surprisingly, organized crime had become involved, and BC Bud was now being transported and warehoused by local motorcycle gangs. But how was it getting across the border? Indy leaned over his desk, running his hands through his hair. No matter how many times he asked himself this question, there was never an answer. Every inch of the border was monitored. The American Coast Guard had extra vessels plying the waters between Vancouver Island and the American mainland. Remote aerial craft with TV cameras were being employed. Monitoring rooms with hundreds of video feeds existed in BC and Washington, and yet the border leaks continued, unimpeded. There was obviously a hole, but where the hell was it?

The issue before him, however, was even more serious. High-grade heroin was now showing up in California, Oregon, Washington, and other neighboring states. It was a new and very serious aspect to the problem. Agent Stanley Hagen, of the Seattle FBI field office, had been particularly aggressive about the issue during their telephone call earlier that day.

“And now heroin is coming into the US through BC,” Hagen had literally shouted into the phone. “Load after load after damn dump-truck load of high-grade marijuana, and now, and now HEROIN!” He had seen many good kids go sideways because of marijuana; he didn’t want to think about the added criminality that came with the more serious use of heroin yet. He was going to take it up with the State department, he said. He was going to DC with this. It had to stop.

Indy knew Hagen was right. Indy also had a reasonably good idea about what would happen next. The FBI would lean on State. State would lean on its Canadian Embassy, who would start a chain of events that would end with the Inspector General of the RCMP proceeding to shit on Indy and his colleagues. Indy’s protestations about low budgets, lax laws, and easy courts with dope-smoking judges would simply fall on deaf ears.

The evidence Hagen presented to Indy seemed clear enough. The heroin coming into the United States was from the Middle East or the golden triangle of Southeast Asia. And it was repeatedly showing up in raids of marijuana wholesalers in the state of Washington. That meant that the same hands were involved. It was coming over the BC/Washington border somehow. Somewhere. But where? And how?

T
HE CONVOY CAME at the expected time. An old Humvee. An even older Volvo N86. And another Humvee. The vehicles came rumbling down the Al Jawf Highway in Libya, surreal in the shimmering bands of heat. “Highway” was a bit of a misnomer, since the road was only a rutted single lane trail, often disappearing completely beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara. The heat and the late afternoon sun were unrelenting. Without water, no human could last more than two days in this environment. Abu bin Mustafa was born in Egypt, but on the Nile delta. He had spent years in the deserts of Yemen and Afghanistan, but still found the endless sandy solitude of the southern Sahara to be unnerving.

He shifted from one foot to the other, pulling his attention off his thirst. “This should be easy,” he told himself, speaking aloud simply to break the heavy silence. Just get the job done and he could get on a plane and have all the water and air conditioning he wanted. The location was perfect for an ambush—the roadway descended slightly, and rounded a sharp curve. Mustafa had his men park their Toyotas across the road, where they would be least visible. Then he and the three others assumed positions behind the rock formations that rose up on both sides of the highway. The sun’s position was in their favor. There would be ten, he’d been told. Four in the lead vehicle, two in the Volvo, and four more in the third vehicle. Three American soldiers. Seven Libyan soldiers. Mustafa and his men communicated through collar microphones, and each carried a Heckler and Koch PSG-1, equipped with a 6x Hensoldt scope. The rifles were extremely accurate, auto-loading, and equipped with 20-round magazines. The ammunition used had also been modified to maximize the weapons’ killing power. The modifications were not popular, because of the expense, but that had never deterred Mustafa’s employer, who was the mastermind behind the attack. Mustafa drew a breath and gave the count as the vehicles drew to within firing range.

At Mustafa’s signal, four rifles cracked as one. Four soldiers keeled over, dead. Two soldiers in the last Humvee and the two soldiers in the Volvo were hit. Within a split second, four rifles fired again. The two soldiers left in the trailing Humvee slumped over. Two soldiers in the lead Humvee were hit. One more split second reload. As the two remaining soldiers in the lead Humvee rolled out of their vehicle, attempting to gain some cover, they were also killed. Mustafa was astounded at the ease of it. It was just as Yousseff, his boss, had said to him more than once. Preparation was everything.