Gauntlet (4 page)

The men rose as one and headed down to the vehicles. Barking a quick command at the others to check the bodies, Mustafa pulled back the tarp slung over the Volvo’s deck and smiled as he saw row upon row of what appeared to be reddish cellophane-wrapped bricks. Again, it was as Yousseff had told him. The two old Humvees were driven off the road and parked behind the same rock formations that had hidden Mustafa and his men. The bodies were pulled out of the Volvo and placed in the Humvees, and the Volvo, with its valuable cargo, was turned around. A new convoy formed, this time heading north—a Toyota in front, a Toyota in the rear, and the Volvo with the Semtex in the middle. Mustafa rode shotgun in the Volvo.

The three vehicles raced northward as quickly as the tattered roadway allowed, and within an hour turned right, heading east on a barely visible goat-path of a road that serviced, occasionally, the desert village of Zighan. Another five miles, and a decrepit, weatherworn building came into view. Behind it sat a few single-engine craft and a reconditioned DC-3. It had taken Mustafa and his colleagues several days to find this isolated and rarely used airport, and a goodly sum of money to cover the bribe that would permit them to take off without a flight plan. When they arrived, the Volvo was backed up to the DC-3, and the four men worked quickly to transfer the bricks, row by row, to the cargo compartment of the plane. This would be the first of many transfers. Mustafa saw the airport manager watching the process with interest. Not a good sign.

The sun had set by the time the task was finished. Mustafa ordered his sweating men to board their plane. He went back into the tiny terminal, and smiled at the master. He didn’t like this part of the job, and wished one of Yousseff’s paid assassins had been sent along to take care of it. The stationmaster appeared friendly, with lines of laughter circling his eyes. But he had seen too much, hadn’t he? Yousseff hated loose ends, and would commend his judgment. When he was four feet from the man, Mustafa pulled out his 9 mm Glock and shot him once in the head. One more bullet in the heart for good measure, and that was that.

One of the other men had already started the engines of the DC-3 when Mustafa reached it, and within minutes the plane, loaded down with 4,300 kilos of Semtex, was on a southeastern course, headed toward the Sudan. Mustafa reached for the Thuraya Sat-phone.

T
HREE THOUSAND MILES and several time zones to the east, in a large hangar in Jalalabad, a phone was ringing. Three times, then a pause, then twice more. Then silence. It was the signal. Yousseff smiled to himself, setting down what he had been reading and leaning back in his chair. The plan was in motion, and there would be no turning back now.

A
MILE OR SO DOWNRIVER from the hangar, Zak Goldberg was making his first transmission in a week, using the tiny transmitter engineered by the propeller heads at Langley. Smaller than a matchbox, it contained only two buttons—an on/off switch and a Morse code communication button for sending out an encrypted Morse code signal. More than 90 percent of the device was battery. When turned on, it transmitted its position to one of the several unmanned Global Hawks cruising 60,000 feet above him; they in turn transmitted the position, and the Morse code message, to the US Embassy in Islamabad. The Morse code was translated to alphanumeric characters, and printed out on a high-speed printer located in the communications room in the Embassy’s basement. When this newest message came in, the clerk on duty glanced at it, yawning. Then he snapped to attention and read it quickly, and wide-eyed, a second time. It was no fine judgment call in this case to ring Michael Buckingham, the CIA station chief. This information needed to be passed along immediately. He picked up the telephone and quickly dialed Buckingham’s local number.

A
UGUST 10 CAME TOO EARLY for Richard. The last of the convoys had arrived near midnight the night before. It was well past 2am by the time the bricks had been fully unloaded at Ground Zero, under the watchful eyes of Jason McMurray and his men. McMurray himself worked through the rest of the night, threading the fuses through the mass of Semtex. The pile had been laid out in concentric circles, and stacked pyramid style. Each segment was separately threaded with fuses designed for shaped charge explosives, and hooked up to a series of Amptec Research timers. The timers were hooked up in parallel and linked to a complicated switching device, which was in turn connected to McMurray’s laptop. At zero hour, which had now been set for 3pm, the laptop would electronically signal the timers, which would simultaneously send powerful currents through the mass of fusing cables to each layer of the Semtex pyramid. McMurray was so obsessed with the simultaneous ignition of the entire mass that he had cut the fusing cable himself and then calculated the exact volume that each layer would take. He had spent days reviewing his calculations over and over again to ensure that the ignition would be simultaneous and complete. Richard had thought it might be as simple as shoveling it all in a heap and firing an RPG into it, but McMurray was horrified at the suggestion.

Other military units had now become involved. The Air Force Materiel Command out of Wright-Patterson had sent a detachment of six people, who had, to McMurray’s frustration, peppered the growing Semtex pile with sensors of various sorts. They’d also laid out further concentric circles of thermo-graphic, electromagnetic, and percussion sensors at various distances from Ground Zero. The Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate, stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, had seen the coverage on CNN, and had sent its own team of experts to monitor the blast. Richard and McMurray both found it highly amusing that these groups had found out about the blast from news reports, and not from the Air Force internal command structure. “Would never happen in the Navy,” Richard muttered to himself.

“They’re Air Force weenies,” said McMurray, trying to lighten the mood. “Any explosion bigger than a fart and they need to study it. You know how it goes.”

To round it out, four Navy Night Hawk Helicopters, with support and ground crew, had been sent from the
Theodore Roosevelt
Battle Group, stationed in the Mediterranean, along with a small Marine Expeditionary Unit to supplement the Libyan security forces.

“There are too many guys in uniforms running around here,” said Richard.

“That’s how things go wrong.” A familiar pain was invading his temples, and he dug into his pockets for some of his medication. He popped a couple of Oxycontins—not ideal, but it was the first thing he found.

“Know the feeling well,” said McMurray, watching Richard throw back what he assumed to be aspirin or ibuprofen. “When I’m done with this job I’m off with my kids and wife. She inherited this gorgeous place on a lake in southern Arizona. I negotiated thirty 30 days.”

“Kids?” asked Richard.

“Yup, three girls. Two, four, and six. They’re the reason I put up with a lot of this bull. You?”

“Two. Out of the house. Gone. My wife took them when she left. Sometimes wish they were two and four again. I’d do anything to go back.” McMurray shuddered a bit when he heard the hollow tone in Richard’s voice. It was well known that Richard’s first wife had left him, and taken the kids, shortly after he was asked to leave the Navy.

McMurray turned back to his counts, anxious for a way to end what had suddenly become an awkward conversation.

A
S ZERO HOUR APPROACHED, the anticipation became palpable. CNN tried to bring a helicopter into the area, but the Libyans wouldn’t approve the use of the airspace. “Bloody good thing, too,” Richard said when he heard. He didn’t want to have to deal with the fallout if a news chopper and crew were destroyed by their little explosion. McMurray had been on the Sat-phone with some of the propeller heads at Fort Gilles, and he told Richard that the observation post should be pushed back to five miles from Ground Zero. Minyar himself was present, in his tent, and his camp needed to be moved as well.

With two hours left to go before the moment of truth, a team of frantic scientists from the Livermore National Laboratory arrived, begging for a 24-hour postponement. They had spent a billion dollars in the past decade to study non-nuclear high explosives, and just a minor repositioning of the pile, and the insertion of a few hundred more sensors (which were on their way) would provide an extraordinary research opportunity. Richard told them to get stuffed.

“It’s going to be one hell of a blast, Richard,” McMurray said, watching the offended scientists drive away in a huff. “I’m not really sure what will happen. None of these scientists even know. Nothing of this magnitude has ever been done before in a controlled environment. The pressure wave will be immense, and it’s going to throw up one monster of a dust cloud. That’s why everyone wants to be here to see it.”

“Pretty screwball idea to invite the media, if you ask me,” Richard replied. “But I suppose Minyar wants to score some brownie points on the international stage.”

“Actually, I agree with what we’re doing here,” said McMurray. “Semtex is like Play-Do Silly Putty You can stick it anywhere. Took less than a pound to do the Lockerbie thing. It’s too versatile a weapon. It’s good for the world to see this big a pile of it destroyed. Makes everyone safer.”

“Well, I’ll tell the crowd to move back. We can’t take the chance of fucking this up in front of the world media.” Richard had the Libyan soldiers demobilize the media camp and move it back a few more miles. Then he went over the inventory sheets one last time, checking off the volumes of Semtex delivered to Ground Zero with the inventories that had been counted by the joint Libyan and CIA teams when they first started loading it up. Everything was looking on track, with 20 minutes left to run.

Then he noticed a problem. Something that didn’t quite match up.

“Wait a second, what’s this?” he muttered to himself. He was looking at the Benghazi Marine Base tallies. More than 200 tons of the Semtex had been stored there, and some 35 truckloads were required to bring it to Bazemah. “Let’s see,” he continued. “Exactly 192,800 kilos in Benghazi. Thirty-five loads. Thirty-four tallies. Total, total...188,500 kilos from Benghazi in Bazemah... wait a minute ...” The numbers were dancing off the pages in front of his eyes.

McMurray interrupted his thoughts. “Fifteen minutes to liftoff, Richard. We’re wired up and ready to go.”

“That’s good, Sergeant,” murmured Richard, a trickle of sweat running down his forehead. “That’s good.” He was starting to fret. His blurring vision was causing the fine print on the tallies and inventory sheets to drift in and out of focus. The eleventh-hour move from two miles back to five miles back had been irritating. The haste of the operation, and the deadline created by Minyar for the benefit of the press, had made for less-than-optimal planning. The magnitude of the task had been underestimated, and the delivery schedule over the past week had turned out haphazard at best. The presence of the research teams and the growing satellite uplink camp being assembled by various news services was too distracting. Richard had never received training for this sort of thing. He looked again at the delivery tallies and inventories. He was missing a sheet. He went back to the Humvee that had served as his base of operations, knowing that his movements were becoming frantic. Surely the sheet was there. Surely.

“Ten minutes,” called McMurray, oblivious to Richard’s panic. This was going to be the biggest bang of his career. After spending more than a decade and a half with explosives, this was his Nirvana.

W
HILE MCMURRAY AND RICHARD were waiting for that colossal explosion, the Intelligence Community experienced a seismic blast that was significantly larger on the Richter scale of importance. Zak Goldberg’s Morse code message had been sent from Michael Buckingham to Robert Baxter, head of the CIA Office of Middle East and African Intelligence. Buckingham trusted Baxter to get the message immediately, regardless of the time zone change. Baxter never seemed to sleep. Come to it, he never seemed to leave his office. There would be no problem with getting his immediate attention.

Baxter did indeed receive the message the moment it came in, and sent the report on to Jeremy Kendall, who was the Director of Intelligence of the CIA. From there it landed at the White House, and, recently added to the list of recipients, the TTIC control center, where Dan had Johnson displayed it on all nine of the 101’s. The theory was that images repeated multiple times had greater impact. Dan did not announce anything. He simply displayed the message and waited for the busy background noise of beepers, telephones, pagers, and conversations to subside. The silence that spread through the room was similar to the sudden hush caused when a maestro walked onstage unannounced. Dan was about to raise his conductor’s wand and start the show when a distressingly familiar noise broke the silence.

“I’ve got it!” yelled Turbee, in obvious triumph. “It’ll be two hundred fifty meters across; twenty seven meters 258 meters across, 27 meters at its deepest point, providing the Semtex is properly detonated.” He had just finished a burrito, and was jumping around the mess he always left after food.

“Turbee, what the hell are you ranting about now?” asked the irritated maestro.

“The crater, sir. The size of the crater. You know, the hole in the desert in Libya. There’s this big betting pool in Las Vegas on how big the crater will be, and I’ve been able to apply some discrete fluid mechanics equations to the vectors—”

“Stuff it, kid. We’ve got serious shit happening and we don’t care about the size of some crater or betting pool. Stick with the program,” interrupted Dan.

“E-mail it in, anyway,” whispered Khasha, who worked at the station next to Turbee’s. “Make some money. Buy me dinner. Ignore the pompous ass.”

“Well, why not?” he whispered back. The pool had been growing rapidly, and the winner would stand to make a tidy sum. Within seconds, Turbee had sent in his estimate on the crater size, and put the $1,000 bet on his American Express.

Now that he’d dealt with the interesting stuff, he turned his focus to the screens behind his boss.

“This came in less than an hour ago,” Dan was saying. “The transmission is from the Jalalabad area of Afghanistan. The source is Zak Goldberg, who is the CIA’s top asset in Afghanistan. He’s been operating undercover there for close to four years. Buckingham, the Embassy Chief in Islamabad, is of the opinion that this message should be considered solid and accurate information, with a high degree of reliability. Most of the Langley people involved seem to agree. As you can see from this communication, it is an indication of a serious, severe, and imminent threat to the country. Please take your time to read this. Let it sink in for a bit.”

He stepped to the side, gesturing dramatically at the image displayed behind him. All eyes turned to the screens at the front of the room, and read the message Zak had sent.

HAVE RECEIVED CREDIBLE, VERIFIABLE INFORMATION THAT A MAJOR TERRORIST STRIKE AGAINST THE USA IS IN ADVANCED PLANNING STAGES AND WILL BE PUT INTO EXECUTION WITHIN DAYS. LIKELY DATE OF ATTACK WILL BE EARLY SEPTEMBER THIS YEAR. POSSIBILITY THAT ATTACK WILL BE BY WATER. ATTACK DESIGNED TO CAUSE 100 TIMES THE DAMAGE TO AMERICAN LIVES AS PAST ATTACKS. EMIR GLOATS THAT THIS COULD DESTABILIZE AMERICA ENTIRELY. REPEAT—THIS INFORMATION IS HIGHLY CREDIBLE. PASHTUN DRUG LORDS ARE WORKING WITH EMIR. WILL TRAVEL WITH THEM TOMORROW TO FIND OUT MORE. MISSION HAS BECOME EXTREMELY DANGEROUS BUT THE MAGNITUDE OF THE THREAT REQUIRES THAT I CONTINUE. WILL ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE AGAIN TOMORROW.

For a few moments silence reigned in the control room. At length Dan himself broke the tense calm.

“Does anyone here know Zak Goldberg? Do we have an assessment of the quality of his information?”

“I never knew him personally, Dan,” Rhodes spoke up. “But I was head of the Middle East Intelligence Directorate for a long time. I know his reputation. He’s as close to platinum plated as an agent can get. He has intimate knowledge of the lay of the land there. He grew up hanging around places like Rawalpindi, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Kabul. He knows the customs and speaks the native dialects perfectly. He had a very impressive career with the Marines, and an even more impressive run with the Firm before he went underground in Kabul four years ago. If Zak says it’s a credible threat, and about to be put into execution, then it’s a credible threat and about to be put into execution. Zak is the best there is.” His brow knit together, transmitting his growing worry. Zak’s position at the moment didn’t sound like a good one.

“Johnson, get the station chief at Islamabad on the line, would you? He can give us the goods,” commanded Dan.

After 15 minutes, Johnson gave up. Apparently the President, the Secretary of Defense, the heads of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and just about everyone else, ranked ahead of Dan’s agency. All those who could do so had pulled rank to get to the station chief in Islamabad. As Dan fumed about life’s slights and inequities, Rhodes came up with a suggestion.

“Dan, Goldberg has a very close friend. Since childhood, same back-ground—they grew up together in Islamabad. They did the armed forces together, then the CIA. That person happens to be the agent looking after the Libyan Semtex project.”

At the mention of the Semtex, Turbee, who had lost interest, was suddenly paying attention again. Rhodes smiled when he saw the attentive gaze snap back onto the
enfant terrible’s
face.

“You mean Richard Lawrence?” asked Dan.

“The very same. Get Johnson to dial him up. He’ll probably give you the straight story.”

“Over to you, Johnson,” Dan ordered.

Five minutes later, Richard answered his phone. The call was routed through TTIC’s state-of-the-art control room speaker system, so that everyone could hear the call.