The Insider Threat (6 page)

T
hey’d continued on the dirt road, seemingly driving straight into the desert, until Jacob could see the training camp in the distance. A collection of tents and crumbling buildings, it was some type of abandoned industrial facility. Maybe for oil. Maybe for something else. It reminded Jacob of a scene out of
The Road Warrior
. Whatever it was, the compound provided the necessary infrastructure to house up to two hundred men, and ample buildings to learn the art of urban fighting.

The lone HiLux drove straight through the center, Jacob seeing armed men dressed in black scurrying about and hearing shouted commands filling the air. But the triumphant black flags of the Islamic State were nowhere to be found. When Jacob had first arrived on the battlefield, it was all the rage to wave them about for Internet videos and pure intimidation. Now they were hidden. An indication of the fear the leadership felt from American surveillance, and the devastating air strikes that followed.

None of the men gave them a second glance. They drove past the collection of tents used as a barracks to house the fighters, an area that Jacob knew well, and continued on to a two-story concrete building on the outskirts of the compound. A much more hospitable residence than the tents, it was where the instructors stayed. And where the Lost Boys’ motivation had been tested.

Jacob tightened his grip on his AK-47, feeling his pulse increase. The driver, a thin Arab with a sharp nose and a spotty, mangelike beard, stopped the truck and waved them forward.

They jumped out of the back, following him single file inside the building. They were led to the second floor, walking down a hallway of broken brick and buckled windows. The Arab stopped outside the one room with a functioning door and knocked. Something was shouted in Arabic, and he opened it.

Jacob saw a dilapidated couch, two metal chairs, and a desk. Behind it was an imposing man with a ginger beard and a face made of cracked granite. Creases like veins running through stone and faded blue eyes that had seen more than enough to eradicate any notion of mercy.

He said, “I am Omar al-Khatami.”

Jacob heard the name and wondered what was going on. Omar had been his upper-echelon commander in the fight for Mosul. A Chechen with a myth of invincibility surrounding him like a black shroud because of his battlefield prowess and his unrelenting cruelty. Something learned long before the Islamic State, in the bloodbath known as Grozny.

“Take a seat. We have some things to discuss.”

The Lost Boys looked at one another for support and he barked, “Sit down. Now.”

They did so without further encouragement, cramming themselves into the broken couch.

He went face-to-face, searing them with the absolute power he held over their fate. He settled on Jacob last.

“Jacob, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You came to us from the United States, swearing
bay’ah
to the caliphate. To the Islamic State, yet you still bear the name of the infidel. Why?”

Jacob saw the heat coming from the Chechen’s eyes, and met it with his own. “That’s the name I was given at birth. It’s my identity. It is who I am.”

“Most, when they embrace the true path, also embrace Allah. Dropping the false trappings of the hedonistic West. Yet you do not. It causes questions.”

Jacob felt the fear drop away, his soul moving again into the netherworld, just as it had when he’d sliced the traitor’s neck. And every time he had crossed the threshold of the white house. He retreated to a numb place where pain existed but didn’t control him.

He looked the Chechen in the eye and said, “My commitment isn’t held in my name. It’s held in my actions.”

He waited on the outburst. Waited to be led to the Islamic State version of the white house. He was surprised.

Omar glared at him for a brief pause, then laughed and said, “Yes, yes, I guess that’s true. You were a lion in Mosul. Can you be such a lion when there are no bullets shooting at you? Can you show the same commitment?”

Jacob said, “Of course. Just tell us what you want. We’ll execute.”

“What I want is for you to martyr yourself.”

The words hung in the air, Hussein hearing them and beginning to hitch his breathing, Carlos and Devon entranced, wide eyes staring at the Chechen.

“Can you do that? Or is your name an indication of your commitment?”

“My commitment was shown in the creation of the caliphate. In the fight for Mosul.”

He maintained his eye contact with the Chechen, no longer caring about his fate, and said, “There was only one Iraqi army unit in Mosul that fought. While the other Iraqis ran away, and the Islamic State claimed victory, I ensured that success. I killed them all.”

The Islamic State succeeded by terrorizing its enemies, using brutality to beat them into submission before a fight, which is exactly what happened in Mosul when the Iraqi army fled. All but one element. They apparently didn’t get the word that their buddies were running through fields in half-dressed civilian clothes and getting gunned down by giddy Islamic State fighters driving in SUVs.

So they fought.

Jacob and the other Lost Boys were merely cannon fodder in the battle, as his element was composed of new recruits, and had no real martial skill. When their leader had been killed, the discipline broke down and the recruits began to retreat. Jacob had rallied them, fighting like a demon, and had actually routed the Iraqi element force on force, using will alone.

Afterward, he’d mopped up the survivors, shooting them in the back as they lay in a ditch pretending to be dead, or running down dark alleys, camouflaged pants under hastily stolen civilian shirts.

Omar considered his words and said, “Yes. I have heard.” He stood up. “I’ve done the same thing in Dagestan, fighting the Russians. It gives me a soft spot for you, but I promise, it will disappear at the slightest indication you or your men are considering leaving. You’re in it now. Forever.”

Jacob nodded and said, “Remember, we volunteered to come here. We have nowhere to go now. The Islamic State is our home.”

“You’ll be leaving your home soon. Going back to the West, where you’ll conduct an attack that will leave you etched into the history of the caliphate.”

“What is the target?”

“All in good time. You have some
shahid
training first, along with other selected instructions. First, some rules. One: Never, ever use any social media. Stay out of pictures being taken, and never tell anyone here you are on a mission. Nobody is to know. Two: There will be others arriving. They are on a mission as well, but they know nothing of yours. Do not let them know you are doing something different. Let them believe you are with them.”

The Lost Boys nodded and Omar said, “Fine. Get settled. You stay here, with the leadership. Your instruction will begin tomorrow.”

*   *   *

They’d awoken the following morning, conducting prayers and wondering when they’d start learning the art of the suicide bomber, when Ringo had shown up with a band of about twenty men. All of Arabic descent, some from the West, like Ringo, but most from countries in the Gulf States, they filtered past bringing in their makeshift luggage and weapons. The same man who had driven the Lost Boys directed them to their rooms.

Jacob watched them disappear. Jordanians, Tunisians, Algerians, and others, all younger than twenty-five. By this time, he’d learned to distinguish nationality by dress.

Ringo saw Jacob following the men with his eyes and said, “That’s right. Those are the chosen ones. Like me. The only Lost Boy helping out this mission will be Hussein. A true member of the Islamic State. Not some American surfer-boy imposter.”

Hussein snapped his head to Ringo and said, “What? I’m American too.”

“Yes, I know.” He gave his little arrogant smile and said, “If it were up to me, I’d leave you behind just because of your company, but your father’s Jordanian. Something that’s apparently going to be useful.”

Jacob said, “He can’t go with you. He’s with us. We need him.”

“For what? Cleaning our weapons? Cooking our food?”

Jacob saw his friend looking at him, Hussein’s eyes betraying panic at the words, realizing he was lost. Jacob said, “For . . . for the mission.”

Ringo laughed, and slapped Hussein’s back, saying, “Exactly right. The mission. The one you won’t be a part of.”

Jacob felt Hussein’s gaze on him, begging for help. It was all Jacob could do to physically restrain himself from killing Ringo outright.

B
rett called, saying he was in position, but he was unclear how long he could remain. I looked at Knuckles, wearing a knit hat and a dreadlock wig, with his face, neck, and hands blacked out. I knew what he was thinking.
If Brett is having trouble just standing around, how the hell am I going to last five seconds?

I keyed my radio and said, “What’s the issue?”

“Nothing big. The area’s just really rough, and the cockroaches are coming out now that the sun’s down.”

I winked at Knuckles and said, “Want me to send in your partner?”

“Hell no. I’d rather get beaten to death than be caught next to him in that ridiculous outfit. He looks like Dan Aykroyd on the train in
Trading Places
.”

Knuckles rolled his eyes. I studied him, and he
did
look a little like Aykroyd’s character. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to talk to anyone, and the whole idea was to prevent a random shanty-dweller from doing a double take at a white man wandering around the Kibera slums. It sounded stupid, but during the Rhodesian War a Special Forces unit called the Selous Scouts—arguably one of the best the modern world has ever seen—had done this very thing, infiltrating terrorist strongholds wearing greasepaint that made them look like the terrorists themselves.

We’d sent all of our data taken from Panda back to the Taskforce for analysis and learned that he was attempting to help the barbarians of ISIL increase their oil production, not with funds but with actual expertise. I’d recommended taking them off the board, and that had caused some consternation within the Oversight Council. Especially when I told them how I wanted to do it.

Retro came on. “Panda’s in position. Looks like the meeting’s a go.”

I said, “You clean? No issues?”

“No. We’re outside the ring of security, and Jennifer looks nothing like she did.”

We’d scrubbed everything associated with Panda from our entry earlier, and due to his huge electronic tether, could now follow his every move with Taskforce assets. Right after Jennifer’s little escapade in his room, we’d been forced to relocate to another hotel in the city center and stay as far away from Panda as possible, focusing on the five Nigerians. I’d come up with the plan to neutralize them, then Panda had initiated a meeting with the group’s leader.

I’d halted our operations, going back to the Taskforce and asking for a modification of the course of action. Asking to interdict the leader of the Nigerians after the meeting instead of my original plan. Simply removing all five would have been easiest, but we would lose valuable intelligence against the Islamic State. We might get information from the Saudis after they interrogated Panda, but it wasn’t a given, and even if we did, the information would always be suspect.

The last time we’d wholeheartedly trusted our Arab counterparts had been in late 2009, when Jordan had fed us an asset from inside al Qaida, who supposedly had a location to Osama bin Laden. The CIA had met him at a forward operating base in Afghanistan to debrief, eager to learn what he knew and never questioning his motivations for turning against his AQ masters. They completely relied on his vetting from Jordanian intelligence.

He had other plans.

He turned out to be a triple agent on a suicide mission. He exited his vehicle inside the perimeter of the base and detonated his vest, causing the largest single loss of CIA personnel in history.

I preferred a little ground truth to secondhand KSA intelligence, and had convinced the Taskforce to let me give it a try after this meeting. Panda might be a bigwig Saudi, preventing us from putting the screws to him, but the Nigerian was a nobody, and interrogating him could provide quality information. The problem was that only Retro remained clean. Everyone else on the team had been involved with the extraction of Jennifer.

We’d mulled over options, and Jennifer had convinced me that she was good to go also, since she’d had on a wig and fancy clothes when they’d met, and Panda had spent most of the time in the toilet. Today, she was back to being a dirty blonde, with her hair let down and covering her face, and had dressed blandly, with a set of glasses to further alter her appearance.

Retro’s call was letting me know they weren’t close to being burned. I clicked over to the command net, calling Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, currently staged in a warehouse four miles away with the support team.

“Showboat, this is Pike. Conditions are set. Do we have execute authority?”

It wasn’t his official callsign, but the only time Blaine ever showed up for an operation was to control the endgame, so I liked poking him in the eye. In effect, he got all the glory without slogging through the work, something I always kidded him about.

“Pike, Showboat. Standby for Omega.”

The Taskforce called every stage of an operation a different Greek letter, starting with Alpha for the introduction of forces. Omega—the last letter—meant we were at an endgame. Ordinarily, we received Omega from the Oversight Council prior to an operation and that was it. We executed how we saw fit, then told them the results. In this case, I had Omega for my plan of removing the five, but given the size of the target, the fact that we’d just executed a separate Omega operation against Panda on Kenyan soil, and the curveball I’d thrown about taking the leader for interrogation, the Council had grown skittish. For the first time, they held execute authority in DC with Kurt. Which was cutting things a little close, to say the least.

Brett called. “Trigger. The men are headed to dinner. The leader’s on the move.”

We’d watched the group for three days, and they were extremely clannish. Everything they did, they did together, which had been the genesis of my plan. Right up until we’d gotten the intercept about a meeting.

On the team net I said, “Leader’s broken from the group?”

“Yep. He’s headed north. They’re headed east.”

North was to the Adams Arcade shopping area on Ngong Road, and to the coffee shop where Panda was sitting.
Phase one’s a go.

I said, “Fall back. Meet us at the linkup. Dan Aykroyd here’s got the package ready.”

I put the van in gear, seeing Knuckles grimace. I called Blaine and said, “Do we have Omega for the leader? He’s on the move, and Panda is set.”

“Pike, they want to wait until after the meeting before giving you Omega on him. You report the situation, and then they’ll decide.”

“Damn it, Blaine, you know we can’t run an operation like that. I need execute authority before, so I can deal with any contingencies.”

“Then you don’t have it. Execute the original plan and let him go.”

Shit.

I said, “Okay, okay. I’ll send a SITREP when I have it.”

We continued south, and the area began to get seedy as we approached the infamous Kibera slums. Thankfully, the Nigerians were staying in a decrepit building on the outskirts and not in the shantytowns of the slum proper. If they had been, there was no way we could execute my plan. Kibera was a no-man’s-land of gangs, glue-sniffing youth, and splintered lives wreaking desperation.

Comprised of a rat-warren maze of houses built out of plastic, scrounged wood, and tin cans, Kibera was one of the largest slums in the world, jam-packed with an incredibly dense population that had nothing better to do than sit around and stare at whoever was around. Probing it would have been a nonstarter. Luckily, the Nigerians’ safe house was in a courtyard of broken concrete structures just north. It prevented us from driving right up, but at least we could infiltrate it on foot.

I saw a penlight flash and pulled over. Knuckles slid open the door, and Brett entered the van. He saw Knuckles and laughed, shaking his head. “You sure you don’t want me to do this on my own? I’ve done it plenty of times in the past.”

Brett was an old-school ground branch operative from the CIA, and had conducted some seriously hairy singleton operations in his career, but there was no reason to do that here. I wanted one Operator pulling security while another penetrated the house.

I said, “He’s going.”

“Okay, but he’s also carrying the dope. We get held up, and I’m leaving him behind, dumbass disguise and all.”

Knuckles scowled, not liking the mission at all. He held up a bag of what looked like balloons filled with brown sand, about thirty of them, each a half inch across. He said, “That’s not the plan. You carry the dope. I break inside.”

And that was the operation, in a nutshell. We were going to plant black tar heroin, ready for distribution, inside the shack the Nigerians were using, then alert the police. They’d be locked up indefinitely after the arrest, and no longer available to help the Islamic State. It seemed like a pretty simple plan to me, but man alive, trying to sell that to the Oversight Council was damn near impossible. I mean, it wasn’t like we weren’t walking outside the law anyway. You’d have thought I’d demanded to start selling heroin on the streets of DC to fund our own activities.

Eventually, since there weren’t a lot of options and it solved the problem neatly, Kurt had convinced the Council, and Blaine had flown over, illegally smuggling in heroin so that we could illegally plant it then illegally frame the Nigerians. Neat. At least, I thought it was. Blaine, on the other hand, was decidedly piqued when I’d met him in the storage facility.

He’d said, “You know how hard it was to get this? And how much trouble you’ve caused?”

I said, “Don’t blame me. Blame the Islamic State.”