Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (42 page)

“How do you say, the rats are leaving the ship?”

“You think so, too, sir?” the chief asked, before his lieutenant could.

“To
Iran
?
” the American officer asked. “I know it looks that way, but it doesn't make sense, does it?”

Major Sabah grimaced. “Sending their air force to
Iran
didn't make sense either, but the Iranians kept the fighter planes and let the pilots go home. You need to learn more of the local culture, Lieutenant.”

I've learned that nothing here makes much sense
, she couldn't say.

“What else do we have?”
Sabah
asked the sergeant.

“They talk and go quiet and then they talk some more and go quiet. There's traffic under way now, but KKMC is still trying to crack it.”

“Radar surveillance reports an inbound from Mehrabad to
Baghdad
, coded as a business jet.”

“Oh? Same one as before?”
Sabah
asked the American lieutenant.

“Yes, Major.”

“What else? Anything?” The chief master sergeant handled the answer.

“Major, that's probably what the computers are cooking on right now. Maybe in thirty minutes.”

Sabah
lit a cigarette. P
ALM
B
OWL
was technically a Kuwaiti-owned facility, and smoking was permitted, to the relief of some and the outrage of others. His relatively junior rank did not prevent him from being a fairly senior member of his country's intelligence service, all the more so that he was modest and businesslike in manner, a useful contrast with his war record, on which he'd lectured in
Britain
and
America
.

“Opinions?” he asked, already having formed his own.

“You said it, sir. They're bugging out,” the chief master sergeant replied.

Major Sabah completed the thought. “In hours or days,
Iraq
will not have a government, and
Iran
is assisting in the transition to anarchy.”

“Not good,” the chief breathed.

“The word 'catastrophe' comes to mind,”
Sabah
observed mildly. He shook his head and smiled in a grim sort of way, earning additional admiration from the American spooks.

T
HE
G
ULFSTREAM LANDED
in calm air after the sixty-five-minute flight in from
Tehran
, timed by Badrayn's watch. As punctual as Swissair, he noted. Well, that was to be expected. As soon as it stopped, the door dropped open and the five passengers deplaned, to be met with elaborately false courtesy, which they returned in kind. A small convoy of Mercedes sedans spirited them off at once to regal accommodations awaiting them in the city center, where they would, of course, be murdered if things went poorly. Scarcely had their cars pulled off when two generals, their wives, their children, and one bodyguard each emerged from the VIP terminal and walked to the aircraft. They quickly boarded the G-IV. The co-pilot lifted the door back into place, and the engines started up, all in less than ten additional minutes by Badrayn's Seiko. Just that fast, it taxied off to make the return flight to Mehrabad International. It was something too obvious for the tower personnel to miss. That was the problem with security, Badrayn knew. You really couldn't keep some things secret, at least not something like this. Better to use a commercial flight, and treat the departing generals as normal passengers on a normal trip, but there were no regular flights between the two countries, and the generals would not have submitted themselves to such plebeian treatment in any case. And so the tower people would know that a special flight had come in and out under unusual circumstances, and so would the terminal employees who'd been required to fawn on the generals and their retinues. For one such flight, that might not be important. But it would matter for the next.

Perhaps that was not overly important in the Great Scheme of Things. There was now no stopping the events he had helped to set in motion, but it offended Ali Badrayn in a professional sense. Better to keep everything he did secret. He shrugged as he walked back to the VIP terminal. No, it didn't matter, and through his actions he'd won the gratitude of a very powerful man in charge of a very powerful country, and for doing no more than talking, telling people what they already knew, and helping them to make a decision which could not have been avoided, whatever their efforts to the contrary. How curious life was.

“S
AME ONE.
J
EEZ
, he wasn't on the ground very long.” Through a little effort, the radio traffic for that particular aircraft was isolated and playing in the earphones of an Army spec-6 language expert. Though the language of international aviation was English, this aircraft was speaking in Farsi. Probably thought a security measure, it merely highlighted that aircraft, tracked by radar and radio-direction finders. The voice traffic was wholly ordinary except for that, and for the fact that the aircraft hadn't even been on the ground long enough to refuel. That meant the whole thing was preplanned, which was hardly a surprise under the circumstances, but enlightening even so. Aloft, over the far northwest end of the
Persian Gulf
, an AWACS was now tracking the aircraft as well. Interest, cued by P
ALM
B
OWL
, had perked up enough to move the E-3B off its normal patrol station, now escorted by four Saudi F-15 Eagle fighters. Iranian and Iraqi electronic-intelligence troops would take note of this and know that someone was interested in what was going on—and wonder why, because they didn't know. The game was ever a fascinating one, neither side knowing all it wished, and assuming the other side—at the moment there were actually three sides in the game— knew too much, when in fact none of the three knew much of anything.

A
BOARD THE
G-IV, the language was Arabic. The two generals chatted quietly and nervously in the rear, their conversation masked by engine sounds. Their wives just sat, more nervous still, while the various children read books or napped. It was hardest on the bodyguards, who knew that if anything went wrong in
Iran
they could do nothing but die uselessly. One of these sat in the middle of the cabin and found that his seat was wet, with what he didn't know, but it was sticky and . . . red? Tomato juice or something, probably. Annoyed, he went to the lavatory and washed his hands off, taking a towel back to wipe the seat off. He returned the towel to the lav before he reseated himself, then looked down at the mountains and wondered if he'd live to see another sunrise, not knowing that he'd just limited the number to twenty.

“H
ERE WE GO
,” the chief master sergeant said. “That was the vice-chief of their air force, and the commanding general of Second Iraqi Army Corps—plus families,” he added. The decryption had required just over two hours from the time the scrambled signal had been copied down.

“Expendables?” the USAF lieutenant asked. She was learning, the other spooks thought.

“Relatively so,” Major Sabah agreed with a nod. “We need to look for another aircraft lifting off from Mehrabad soon after this one lands.”

“Where to, sir?”

“Ah. Lieutenant, that is the question, is it not?”

“
Sudan
,” the chief thought. He'd been in-country for two years, and it was his second tour at P
ALM
B
OWL.

“I would not wager against you on that, Sergeant,”

Sabah
observed with a wink. “We should confirm that through the time cycle of the flights out of
Baghdad
.” And he really couldn't make a judgment call on the entire exercise until then, though he already had flagged his own superiors that something unusual was afoot. Soon it would be time for the Americans to do the same.

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER
, a preliminary report was on its way from KKMC to
Fort Meade
,
Maryland
, where the vagaries of time landed it in the watch center just after
midnight
. From the National Security Agency it was cross-decked by fiber-optic cable to
Langley
,
Virginia
, into Mercury, the CIA's communications-watch facility, then upstairs to the CIA's
Operations
Center
, room 7-F-27 in the old headquarters building. At every stop, the information was handed over raw, sometimes with the local assessment, but more often without, or if it were, placed at the bottom so that the national intelligence officers in charge of the various watches could make their own assessments, and duplicate the work of others. Mostly this made sense, but in fast-breaking situations it very often did not. The problem was that one couldn't tell the difference in a crisis.

The national intelligence officer in charge of the watch at CIA was Ben Goodley, a fast-riser in the Directorate of Intelligence, recently awarded his NIO card, along with the worst duty schedule because of his lack of seniority. As usual, he showed his good sense by turning to his area-specialist and handing over the printout just as fast as he could read the pages and tear the sheets away from the staple.

“Meltdown,” the area-specialist said by the end of page three. Which was not unexpected, but neither was it pleasant.

“Doubts?”

“My boy”—the area specialist had twenty years on his boss—“they ain't going to
Tehran
to shop.”

“SNIE?” Goodley asked, meaning a Special National Intelligence Estimate, an important official document meant for unusual situations.

“I think so. The Iraqi government is coming down.” It wasn't all that much of a surprise. “Three days?” “If that much.” Goodley stood. “Okay, let's get it drafted.”

THE  REVIVAL

I
T IS TO BE EXPECTED THAT
important things never happen at convenient times. Whether the birth of a baby or a national emergency, all such events seem to find the appropriate people asleep or otherwise indisposed. In this case, there was nothing to be done. Ben Goodley determined that CIA had no assets in place to confirm the signal-intelligence take, and interested though his country was in the region, there was no action that could be taken. The public news organizations hadn't twigged to this development, and as was often the case, CIA would play dumb until they did. In doing so, the Central Intelligence Agency would give greater substance to the public belief that the news organizations were as efficient as the government in finding things out. It wasn't always the case, but was more frequently so than Goodley would have preferred.

This SNIE would be a short one. The substance of it didn't require a great deal of pontificating, and the fact of it didn't take long to present. Goodley and his area specialist took half an hour to draft it. A computer printer generated the hard copy for in-house use, and a modem transmitted it via secure lines to interested government agencies. With that done, the men returned to the
Operations
Center
.

G
OLOVKO WAS DOING
his best to sleep. Aeroflot had just purchased ten new Boeing 777 jetliners for use in its international service to
New York
,
Chicago
, and
Washington
. They were far more comfortable, and reliable, than the Soviet airliners in which he'd traveled for so many years, but he was less than enthralled with the idea of flying so far on two engines, American-made or not, rather than the usual four. The seats, at least, were comfortable here in first class, and the vodka he'd had soon after takeoff was a premium Russian label. The combination had given him five and a half hours of sleep until the usual disorientation of travel clicked in, waking him up over
Greenland
, while his bodyguard next to him managed to remain in whatever dreamland his profession allowed. Somewhere aft, the stewardesses were probably sleeping as well as they could in their folding seats.

In previous times, Sergey Nikolayevich knew, it wouldn't have been like this. He would have flown on a special charter with full communications gear, and if something had taken place in the world, he'd be informed just as quickly as the transmission towers outside of
Moscow
could dot-dash the information out. All the more frustrating was the fact that something was happening. Something had to be. It was always this way, he thought in the noisy darkness. You traveled for an important meeting because you expected something to take place, and then it happened while you were on the move and, if not totally out of touch, then at least denied the chance to confer with your senior aides.
Iraq
and
China
. Thankfully, there was a wide separation between the two hot spots. Then Golovko reminded himself that there was a wider separation still between
Washington
and
Moscow
, one which lasted about as long as an overnight flight on a twin-engine aircraft. With that pleasant realization, he turned slightly and told himself that he'd need all the sleep he could get.

T
HE HARD PART
wasn't getting them out of
Iraq
. The hard part would be getting them from
Iran
to
Sudan
. It had been a long while since flights from
Iran
had been allowed to overfly the
Saudi
Kingdom
, and the only exceptions were the pilgrimage flights into
Mecca
during the annual hajj. Instead, the business jet had to skirt around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea before turning west to Khartoum, tripling both time and distance on the delivery leg of the process, and the next short flight couldn't begin until the first long one had arrived in Africa, and the VIPs had arrived at their hastily prepared quarters, and found them satisfactory, and made a phone call with the inevitable code word confirming that all was well. It would have been so much easier had it been possible to load them all onto a single airliner for a single Baghdad-Tehran-Khartoum cycle, but that wasn't possible. Neither was it possible to take the far shorter air routing directly from
Baghdad
to
Khartoum
through the simple expedient of overflying
Jordan
. But that meant passing close to
Israel
, not a prospect to make the Iraqi generals happy. And then there was the secrecy issue, too, to make things inconvenient.

A lesser man than Daryaei would have found it enraging. Instead he stood alone at the window of a closed portion of the main terminal, watching the G-IV stop alongside another, watching the doors open, watching the people scurry down one staircase and immediately onto another, while baggage handlers transferred what few belongings they'd brought along—doubtless jewels and other items of high value and portability, the holy man thought without a smile. It took only a few minutes, and then the waiting aircraft started moving.

It was foolish, really, to have come down just to see something so pedestrian and tedious as this, but it represented fully two decades of effort, and man of God though he was, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei was still human enough to want to see the fruits of his labor. A lifetime had gone into this, and even so it was a task not even half done. And his time was running out. . .

As it was for every man, Daryaei reminded himself, one second, one minute, one hour, one day at a time, the same for all, but somehow it seemed to run faster when one was over seventy years of age. He looked down at his hands, the lines and scars of a lifetime there, some natural, some not. Two of his fingers had been broken while a guest of Savak, the Shah's Israeli-trained security service. He remembered the pain of it. He remembered even better the reckoning with the two men who'd interrogated him. Daryaei hadn't spoken a word. He'd just looked at them, stood there like a statue, as they were taken off to the firing squad. Not very much satisfaction in it, really. They'd been functionaries, doing a job assigned to them by others, without really caring who he was or why they were supposed to hate him. Another mullah had sat with each in turn to pray with them, because to deny anyone a chance to reconcile himself with Allah was a crime—and what did it hurt? They died just as quickly that way as any other. One small step in a lifetime's journey, though theirs had ultimately been far shorter than his.

All the years spent for his single-minded purpose. Khomeini had taken his exile in France, but not Daryaei. He'd remained in the background, coordinating and directing for his leader. Picked up that one time, he'd been let go because he hadn't talked, nor had anyone close to him. That had been the Shah's mistake, one of many. The man had ultimately succumbed to indecision. Too liberal in his policies to make the Islamic clergy happy, too reactionary to please his Western sponsors, trying vainly to find a middle ground in a part of the world where a man had only two choices. Only one, really, Daryaei corrected himself as the Gulfstream jet lifted off.
Iraq
had tried the other path, away from the Word of God, and what had it profited them? Hussein had started his war with
Iran
, thinking the latter country weak and leaderless, and achieved nothing. Then he had struck out to the south and accomplished even less, all in the sole quest for temporal power.

It was different for Daryaei. He'd never lost sight of his goal, as Khomeini had not, and though the latter was dead, his task lived on. His objective lay behind him as he faced north, too far to see, but there even so, in the holy cities of
Mecca
and
Medina
. . . and
Jerusalem
. He'd been to the first two, but not the third. As a boy, young and pious, he'd wanted to see the Rock of Abraham, but something, he didn't remember what, had prevented his merchant father from taking him there. Perhaps in time. He'd seen the city of the Prophet's birth, however, and of course made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, more than once despite the political and religious differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He wished to do so again, to pray before the veiled Kaaba. But there was more to it than that, even.

Titular chief of state, he wanted more. Not so much for himself. No, he had a larger task at the bottom of his humble life. Islam stretched from the extreme west of
Africa
to the extreme east of
Asia
, not counting the small pockets of the Faith's adherents in the
Western Hemisphere
, but the religion had not had a single leader and a single purpose for over a thousand years. It caused Daryaei pain that this should be so. There was but one God and one Word, and it must have saddened Allah that His Word was so tragically misunderstood. That was the only possible reason for the failure of all men to grasp the True Faith, and if he could change that, then he could change the world and bring all of mankind to God. But to do that—

The world was the world, an imperfect instrument with imperfect rules for imperfect men, but Allah had made it so, and that was that. Worse, there were those who would oppose everything he did, Believers and un-Believers both, another cause more for sadness than for anger. Daryaei didn't hate the Saudis and the others on the far side of the Persian Gulf. They were not evil men. They were Believers, and despite their differences with him and his country, they'd never be denied access to
Mecca
. But their way wasn't the Way, and that couldn't be helped. They'd grown fat and rich and corrupt, and that had to be changed. Daryaei had to control
Mecca
in order to reform Islam. To do that meant acquiring worldly power. It meant making enemies. But that wasn't new, and he'd just won his first major battle.

If only it didn't take so long. Daryaei often spoke of patience, but his was the work of a lifetime, and he was seventy-two, and he didn't want to die as his mentor had, with the work not even half done. When there came his moment to face Allah, he wanted to speak of accomplishment, of successfully fulfilling the noblest task any man could have, the reunification of the True Faith. And Daryaei was willing to do much for that goal. He himself didn't even know how much it was that he was willing to undertake, because not all the questions had yet been asked. And because his goal was so pure and bright, and his remaining time so short, he'd never asked himself how deeply he would cross into darkness in order to get there.

Well. He turned away from the window and walked off with his driver to the car. The process had begun.

P
EOPLE IN THE
intelligence community are not paid to believe in coincidences, and these particular people had maps and watches to predict them. The unrefueled range of the G-IV was well known, and the distances to be covered were easily computed. The circling AW ACS aircraft established a track heading south from
Tehran
. Transponder settings told them the type of aircraft, along with speed, heading, and altitude, the last being 45,000 feet for maximum fuel efficiency. Timing was checked between one such flight and another. The course told them even more.

“
Sudan
,” Major Sabah confirmed. It could have gone elsewhere. He almost thought that
Brunei
was a possible option, but, no, that would be too far from
Switzerland
, and
Switzerland
was where the money was—had to be.

With that judgment, a satellite signal was sent to
America
, again to CIA, and this one occasioned waking a senior DO official up merely to say yes to a brief question. The answer was relayed back to P
ALM
B
OWL
out of courtesy to the Kuwaitis. Then it was just a matter of waiting.

T
HE CIA HAD
a small presence in
Khartoum
, really just a station chief and a couple of field officers and a secretary whom they shared with the NSA-run signals section. The station chief was a good one, however, who had recruited a number of local citizens to act as agents. It helped that the Sudanese government had little to hide, most of the time, too poor to be of interest as much of anything. In previous times the government had used its geographic location as a ploy to play East against West, garnering cash and weapons and favor out of the bargain, but the
USSR
had fallen and with it the Great Power Game which had sustained the
Third World
for two generations. Now the Sudanese had to depend on their own resources, which were slim, and the few crumbs tossed their way by whichever country had transitory need for what little they had. The country's leaders were Islamic, and in proclaiming it as loudly as they could lie—they were no more devout than their Western counterparts— they managed to get aid from Libya and Iran and others, in return for which they were expected to make life hard on the pagan animists in the southern part of the country, plus risk a rising Islamic political tide in their own capital, people who knew the real level of devotion of the country's leaders, and wanted to replace them with people who truly believed. On the whole the political leaders of that impoverished nation thought it was easier to be religious and rich than religious and poor.

What that meant to the American embassy personnel was great unpredictability. Sometimes
Khartoum
was safe, when the fundamentalist troublemakers were under control. Sometimes it was not, because they were not. At the moment, the former seemed to be the case, and all the American foreign service officers had to worry about were the environmental conditions, which were vile enough to place this post in the bottom ten of global embassy assignments even without a terrorist threat. For the station chief it meant early advancement, though his wife and two children remained home in
Virginia
, because most of the official American residents didn't feel safe enough to set up their families here. Almost as bad, AIDS was becoming a threat sufficient to deny much in the way of nightlife to them, not to mention the question of getting safe blood in the event of an injury. The embassy had an Army doctor to handle those issues. He worried a lot.

The station chief shook that off. He'd jumped a whole pay grade on taking this assignment. He'd performed well, with one especially well-placed agent in the Sudanese foreign ministry to inform
America
about everything that country did. That his country didn't do all that much was not important to the desk-sitters at
Langley
. Better to know everything about nothing than nothing about everything.