Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html)

Synopsis:

In the dead of night, a daring desert raid into Sudan by a Special Forces team led by Lt. Kent “Rat” Rathman ends with the apprehension of the world's most wanted criminal. But the methods necessary to achieve the goal are brutally unorthodox — and a Middle Eastern prisoner suffers and dies as a result.
Wheels of power are turning rapidly in Washington as politicians use the complex international situation to disguise the real motives of crushing their political enemies while fighting the war on terrorism. As a military tribunal convenes to determine the fate of terrorist leader Wahamed Duar, another courtroom drama is about to unfold: the trial of Lt. Rathman for war crimes and murder. But Duar's capture may have come too late and at too high a cost, setting in motion a potentially devastating nightmare of destruction on American soil. The one man who could prevent it now stands accused by his own government . . . and faces a dark future in a military prison.

Pierre Lahoud stood and smiled. “At last, you have arrived,” he said to Wahamed Duar, perhaps the most hated man in the world. They embraced in a cold, distrusting, automatic manner. They crossed warily to the single table sitting in the middle of the candlelit room. Duar took the far side of the table, the side facing the single door. He sat slowly, scrutinizing everyone. His men were dispersed throughout the room, their weapons at their sides.

Acacia controlled his expression of shocked disbelief. Where had Duar been? All the buildings had been searched carefully. They had been waiting for him in this abandoned building in the remote desert of Sudan for two hours—how could ten men show up out of nowhere?

He stood and moved slowly toward the exit. He had to transmit the signal to the American Special Forces circling overhead, waiting for this meeting, waiting to catch Duar.

Duar saw him. “
No one
leaves this room,” he said in Arabic with unshakable authority. His light eyes were fixed on Acacia.

“I have to relieve myself,” Acacia protested with a faint smile as sweat formed under his arms.

“I don’t care if you piss on your feet. No one leaves this room.”

Acacia nodded and shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but he had to activate his pen. It would put everything else in motion. He took it out of his pocket and opened a small notebook as if preparing to take notes.

“No notes,” Duar said, still looking at him, staring into his eyes.

Acacia looked at Lahoud, his boss, who nodded.

Acacia glanced up. His pen had to acquire GPS satellites to get a fix and transmit that fix in a burst transmission. Latitude and longitude. It was all they needed. The existence of the signal would tell them the meeting was under way, and the numbers in the signal would tell them where. But he had to get outside. The roof of the building had been destroyed in whatever action had caused this crossroads to be abandoned, but the thick stucco walls were high, perhaps three stories, with bare crossbeams. There was some chance he could acquire two satellites through the destroyed roof; he had no choice. He pressed the end of his ballpoint pen and moved it slowly to his pocket.

Lahoud’s six other men sat on the floor in random places, much like Duar’s, with their weapons next to them. Their faces were equally full of distrust. Others stood guard outside the building.

Acacia examined Duar, a man neither he nor Lahoud had ever met but knew by reputation. He was nearly six feet tall, thin, and good-looking. He was a native of Sudan and had worked with Usama bin Laden when he was based in Sudan. When bin Laden had been asked to leave by the government of Sudan, Duar had stayed behind to start his own organization to accomplish the same objectives independently. He had been shockingly successful in his grisly business. He was now the most sought-after terrorist in the world. The Americans wanted him badly, obsessively. The bombing of the American embassy in Cairo had been the final straw. It had caused the deaths of forty-six Americans including the ambassador. Fifty-five Egyptians had also been killed outside the embassy compound by the enormous blast. It had been seen for what it was—a simultaneous attack on America and Egypt’s secular government.

Duar had finally agreed to the meeting with Lahoud, one of the world’s leading arms merchants, because Lahoud could deliver what Duar wanted most—weapons grade plutonium. Lahoud claimed to have enough to make a nuclear weapon. Duar was buying. Today Lahoud had only a microscopic amount, just enough to prove he could bring more.

The instant Acacia triggered his pen it searched for the L band GPS transmissions from the twenty-four satellites. Two were high enough to be useful deep inside the dim room. The pen quickly calculated its position and fired its encrypted burst transmission. He hoped to God the transmission went out and was heard, but he knew if the Americans received his signal all hell would break loose.

High over Sudan, Lieutenant Kent Rathman, Rat as he was known, waited with the rest of his SAS team, a Special Operations group of the CIA, as they orbited in one of the Air Force C-17s. He stomped his feet on the hard deck against the cold and looked at his watch again. He paced back and forth in the belly of the noisy jet. The other team members watched him. They were accustomed to his boundless energy and intensity.

Rat leaned on one of the Toyota Land Cruisers painted as Sudanese Army vehicles. The Toyotas would be the first out the door if Rat’s team was the lucky one, the closest team to the agent on the ground known to them only by his code name Acacia, a name selected by the CIA’s random word generation software that had come to rest in the tree section.

The four C-17s were strategically placed. Each carried an American Special Forces team in a quadrant of Sudan. Each was ready, eager, to jump out of the large cargo planes as soon as the meeting was located. The meeting was expected to last only thirty minutes. No more. They knew they wouldn’t have time to fly across the country to get to the meeting. They had to hope one of the teams was on top of the location when the signal was received.

They had waited the night before but never received the signal. This night they had launched again. Their hope had waned as they orbited past eleven, then past midnight. Rat squinted in frustration at Groomer in the low light. He didn’t need to say anything. Groomer had worked with Rat for three years, first in Dev Group, the Navy’s secret counterterrorism team, then in the SAS. In the Navy, Groomer was a lieutenant, junior grade, and in Rat’s SAS team he was the executive officer, or number two. He knew exactly what Rat was thinking: if one of the other teams gets to go it will be wrong, unfair, and unjust. They’d prepared for this mission three times before. They had orbited all night twice before, all for nothing, because Duar was always suspicious and had spooked. But this time, they thought it would go. He was believed to have picked a location so remote that he would feel secure, confident that no one would sneak up on him unexpectedly, and certainly not in thirty minutes.

Groomer walked over to Rat. Rat looked at him quickly to see if he had new information or data that Rat could throw into the hopper that was turning furiously in his brain. He didn’t, he just wanted to chat. “What do you think? We gonna go?”

“We deserve this.”

“ ‘Cause it was your idea?”

“No.” Rat smiled. “Because it’s
us
. We always deserve to go.”

Groomer smiled back and fingered the camouflage paint on the Land Cruiser. “Hell, Rat, if it were me, I’d just drop a bomb on these assholes and vaporize them. Why do we have to go in?”

“You heard Jacobs. They want Duar
alive
. Any cost. Otherwise you’re right. One airplane off a carrier, one JDAM, these guys are gone. They think Duar will open the entire worldwide operation for them. They just need the right can opener. We’re it.”

Groomer shook his head. “I’d just vaporize them.”

It was the Global Hawk that received the weak transmission, the pilotless drone flying sixty-five thousand feet above Sudan. The signal from Acacia’s pen was fainter than expected but the reserved frequency was unmistakable. The drone instantly amplified the signal and relayed it to a hundred waiting receivers. The RIVET JOINT RC-135 received it as soon as the Global Hawk sent it off. The officer monitoring the frequency quickly relayed it to all the Special Operations teams, then examined the chart superimposed on the screen in front of him. The location was automatically marked in southwest Sudan, one of the remotest parts of the country. He sat back and waited.

“Bingo,” Rat said as he stared at the small color screen on his Rugged Personal Digital Assistant, his RPDA-88. It was highly modified and included a GPS receiver and encrypted e-mail capability. “Here we go,” he yelled. Groomer stood by the Land Cruiser to look over Rat’s shoulder at the screen. Rat furiously manipulated the buttons on the side of the screen to call up the map of Sudan with Acacia’s location automatically marked as a waypoint. “We’re it,” Rat exclaimed, seeing the fix in his sector.

The pilots knew it at the same instant. He felt the large C-17 bank toward the destination.

“Everybody up!” Rat yelled, motioning with his hands.

Rat pictured the jump in his mind. The moon would be behind them, but it was a waxing crescent and would be of only marginal help without their night-vision devices.

Rat looked at the Air Force sergeant, the jumpmaster, who was listening carefully on his intercom. He held up two hands. Ten minutes.

Rat nodded. Everyone on his team had seen the signal. He didn’t have to repeat it. Many, like Rat and Groomer, were actually Navy SEALs operating on temporary assignment with the CIA.

His men checked their parachutes and weapons again and tightened their helmets. Rat had been one of the few in the CIA who had been allowed to see the information provided by Acacia. It was stunning. The man’s infiltration of Pierre Lahoud’s illegal arms sales organization had been bold and spectacularly successful. What Lahoud didn’t know was that Acacia, his new finance man, was with the Jordanian GID, the General Intelligence Department, and was working with the CIA. Rat had worked with him before. The reason Acacia had gone to such trouble to work with Lahoud was to be there when Lahoud met with Duar. His only job was to send his single electronic signal when the two were in the same room. The American Special Forces knew he was there, and what he looked like. He was one of the two people the Special Forces were to bring out alive.

Rat opened the file box he had brought aboard the plane. He fingered the files until he found the one that corresponded to Acacia’s location. It had been identified as one of the twenty or so possible meeting locations in his area. Rat tore through the intelligence information again. He had read through it before several times, but now he tried to memorize everything in it, the satellite photos, the infrared images, and the messages. He returned the file and called up the photographs of Duar, Lahoud, and Acacia on his RPDA. He studied Duar’s face. There was only one known photo of Duar. It was a grainy blowup of a distant photo. He had dark long hair, a wispy beard, and light eyes. Rat tried to imagine him without a beard, with a buzz haircut, anything that would make him more difficult to identify. Lahoud was easy; a big square face on a short square body.

The crew chief leaned down toward Rat. “Five minutes!” he yelled, holding up five fingers.

Rat nodded. “Radio check,” he said on his microphone, attached to his helmet.

The eleven others gave him a thumbs-up.

Rat stood up, reattached his RPDA to his lanyard and stuck it into a pocket. He walked back to the ramp that was now almost completely down. The C-17 had descended to twenty-five thousand feet but the air was still bracingly cold. The jumpmaster pressed a button and the three pallets bearing the Land Cruisers inched toward the ramp.

They reached the drop point, got a green light, and the three Toyotas flew out the back of the C-17 into the blackness. Rat went to the back of the ramp, lowered his goggles, turned on his oxygen, and dived into the night.