All Necessary Force (7 page)

he man testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade droned on and on about some obscure prohibition against a technology transfer that was destroying the GDP of some obscure country, of which, apparently, the United States had some obscure but important reason to remain engaged. It was all Congressman Richard Ellis could do to even pretend to care. He had much more important things on his mind. At least important to him. He was thankful that this hearing was taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building, where his workplace was located, instead of the secure compartmented information facility buried underneath the Capitol Visitor Center, where the House Intelligence Committee met, his other committee obligation. It meant he could steal away to his office on the breaks.

A large, jovial man, he had a classic patrician’s face. He looked like a politician should, at least from the left. The profile on the right was marred by a three-inch birthmark that rose from his right eye and ran up into his hairline, like he’d smeared lipstick on his brow. He did his best to cover it with hair, and was always particular about camera angles.

Ellis was well liked on both sides of the aisle, but this conference was testing even his patience.
He must be breathing from his ears
. Finally, the man shut up, allowing Ellis time to whisper some nothings into the chairman’s ear and bolt.

As he arrived at his office, his secretary handed him a list of calls he’d missed. He thumbed through them until he found one that simply said
Oakpark Industries
with a number. The number was new, as expected.
Every time he called Oakpark, he would dial a new number. Those were his rules, not theirs. Rules learned from a lifetime of practice. It was why he was still around.

He told his secretary to hold all calls and closed the door. Pulling open a drawer, he withdrew a brand-new pay-as-you-go cell phone. His number would be new as well. After this call, the phone would go in the trash. Ellis knew that the only way anyone was listening to phone calls either from him or from Oakpark was through a court order, which would dictate in no uncertain terms the number to be monitored. There was no way they could monitor a new phone every time he dialed the company. Well, they could, but nobody would let them.
Call it a business expense
.

A man answered on the third ring. Ellis wasted no time on pleasantries, not wanting to remain on the line any longer than necessary.

“Did you get the cargo?”

“Yeah, we got it. No issues.”

“Is it properly packaged? Like you were instructed?”

“Yes. I told you, no issues. Nobody will be able to tell what it is. We broke all the kits down into separate components, then lumped the like parts together. It looks like a bunch of metal plates and plastic containers. Just like the bill of lading says.”

Ellis relaxed a little bit. He’d facilitated the game many times, but this would be the first time he was a player.

“What about the landing on the far end? For the transfer. Is the coordination complete?”

“Hey, come on, we’re leaving tomorrow. Do you think I’d fly if I didn’t have it squared away?”

Yes, for the money you’re getting, I think you would
. Ellis wished the man on the other end knew he was dealing with a United States congressman, but a little impertinence was worth the security. “Last time we spoke, you had mentioned complications. Have they been resolved?”

“We’re good. It wasn’t a complication. It was just a matter of finding the right guy. We’ve got the airport to ourselves for three hours. Plenty of time. It’s not in Cairo, but it’s close enough.”

Ellis couldn’t believe the man had just said a location. He wanted to
scream into the phone, but he knew that would only attract attention to the mistake—should anyone be listening. He let it ride.

“All right. Go ahead and stage. When I contact you, you need to be on the ground in the following forty-eight hours. Don’t get boozed up on European beer with my per diem.”

Rafik left his hotel room and exited onto the crowded streets of Alexandria, Egypt. It was hot here, but the breeze off the ocean made it much more bearable than the heat around Cairo. He walked north along the shore, passing a coffee shop just off El Gaish Road and entering the Roushdy food court. He cared little about eating at one of the Great Satan’s hegemonic restaurants, but the food court allowed him to watch the café unimpeded, looking for threats before his meeting.

Taking a seat in a Kentucky Fried Chicken, he grimaced at all of the Egyptians waiting to scarf down the infidel’s recipes. He turned toward the window facing the café, disgusted.

Already crowded, the coffee shop had several small round tables underneath an awning, all holding men smoking the ubiquitous shisha water pipe. His contact was a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Once an underground organization that had been hunted relentlessly by the Mubarak regime, it was now the strongest political party in Egypt, torn between an old core responsive to its radical roots and a new, egalitarian base. Even as the party struggled to decide its vision of the future, the radical elements continued. They cherished their heritage as the umbrella group that had spawned and connected just about every Islamic terrorist organization in the world, including Rafik’s own organization, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Originally called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat—or GSPC—al Qaeda in the Maghreb was formed during the civil war in Algeria, a particularly brutal conflict.

Rafik had decided to join the GSPC at the young age of fourteen, when he and his parents had been ripped off the streets by Algerian authorities
in a random cordon and search. He was tortured unmercifully for four days, then released. He never saw his parents again. Consumed by rage, all he wanted was revenge. The GSPC provided that outlet.

As he grew older, he proved himself for higher training. In 2001 he was sent to Afghanistan, where he met the sheik himself, Osama bin Laden. He was there for the glorious strike on September 11, and also there for the fire that followed. Rounded up by the Northern Alliance and the Special Forces team with them, he was on his way to Guantanamo Bay when the prison he was in outside of Mazari Sharif—called Qala-i-Jangi—erupted in a riot. While most of the prisoners satisfied themselves by cowardly beating a CIA man to death and generally running around like lunatics, Rafik escaped, knowing how the riot would finish. He found out later that most of his brethren had died in the massive retaliation of U.S. firepower that followed.

Returning to Algeria, he was a different man. The sheik had shown him that their fight was global. He now saw that the Near Enemy, like the government in Algeria, existed at the pleasure of the Far Enemies of the West. That’s who needed to be destroyed. They were the ones crushing Islam all over the world. Even now, with the shifting landscape of change sweeping the Middle East, the Far Enemy continually thwarted any attempts to return to the one true faith, instead championing a system of debauchery cloaked as democracy.

Try as he might, he couldn’t convince the GSPC leadership. By 2006 he had at least convinced them to pledge loyalty to al Qaeda and change their name. He knew they did it for the publicity and that they had no desire to enter the global fight. They preferred pinprick strikes against the government of Algeria to any strategic global attack in the name of Islam.

He had set out on his own, bringing with him a select number of trusted men. He’d worked nearly five years, patiently building his plan, while al Qaeda in the Maghreb remained somewhat of a joke in the fight for Islam. During that time, Osama bin Laden had been martyred, and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had become the prominent group. That was okay by him. In less than two weeks, he would make sure that al Qaeda in the Maghreb would cause more damage to the Far Enemy than all other attacks combined.

9

J

ennifer came into the office as I was digging through a scattered pile of outdoor gear, looking for my neck light. I was hoping to be done packing before she arrived because she’d just give me shit about procrastinating. When I looked up, she was leaning against the doorjamb with her arms crossed.

I said, “Did you put my neck light back in my duffel after you borrowed it?”

We both knew she hadn’t touched the neck light, but it was worth a shot. As usual, I was packing on the fly. She, of course, had packed her stuff perfectly in one small suitcase before she even left for Assessment in North Carolina.

“Pike, if you’d plan ahead more than five minutes, you wouldn’t be flinging stuff all over the office tonight.”

Yesterday afternoon, we’d flown straight back to Charleston, South Carolina, to our little business called Grolier Recovery Services. Situated in an office complex on Shem Creek just outside of Charleston, we specialized in facilitating archeological work around the world. Jennifer had the anthropology degree to talk scientist, and I had the military background to talk to anyone who had an issue with the scientists. We did everything from laying the groundwork with the host nation and U.S. embassy to providing security on-site. A one-stop shop, so to speak. Just add pencil necks. It was a great cover, because it gave us a plausible reason to travel anywhere that had something of historical significance. Which was just about anywhere on earth.

You’d think that a business plan with those parameters would be
dead on arrival—I mean, really, how many Indiana Jones expeditions could there be at any given time?—but we already had real requests for quotes. Our splashy publicity hadn’t hurt.

We had started the business with the proceeds we earned from finding an ancient Mayan temple in Guatemala. For about sixty seconds, we were all over the news, but much longer for people who actually cared about such things. Because of it, we now had respectable people beating a path to our door. Not that we needed the work, since we could count on a Taskforce paycheck.

I quit trying to find the neck light and shoved everything back into the duffel bag, slinging it into the closet on my side of our small office.

Jennifer came inside and took off her sunglasses, exposing the bruise around her right eye. The sight caused a confusing mishmash of emotions in my gut, making me feel guilty, angry, proud, protective, and shameful all at the same time

I said, “Want me to screen your bag? Make sure it’s clean?”

She knew what I was asking, saying, “Yeah, I guess, but this is my first trip. How could it have anything compromising in it?”

“Good point. Just force of habit. I’ll have to get used to a permanent cover. You could check my bag, though, just to be sure there’s nothing left over from my past.”

She took the backpack and zipped it open, going through the pockets, looking for receipts, business cards, or anything else that could cause a question on this trip. Our purpose was to camouflage Taskforce activities, so everything on us had to support our business, with nothing leading to the unit. It would be bad form to have an ATM receipt from a military post when you were claiming to be a civilian. When I was operational, the hardest thing was making sure my real life didn’t intrude on my cover. I couldn’t believe the clutter I’d accumulate. Just check your wallet to see what I mean. I no longer had to worry about that, because my life and cover were now the same. I was no longer ping-ponging back and forth pretending to be something different every mission.

The people who came with us were different. We would be the skeleton that the Taskforce would fall in on. We had a roster of TF operators who were included as our “employees,” but we’d only see them
when we were tasked with an operation. Knuckles and Bull—our employees on this trip—would be the ones with the risk. Lord knows where they had been in the last six months.

In a nutshell, that was the purpose of our travel. As a company, we had to build a record with Taskforce personnel acting as employees, so we were doing what we called a “cover development” trip. Otherwise known as a “boondoggle” or “vacation on the government dime.” Basically, we just wanted to start populating air travel databases, getting our passports stamped, and collecting business cards from overseas, all of which would support that we were who we said we were. It was a really sweet gig because we’d be forbidden to do anything that wasn’t part of our cover. And it was truly necessary if we wanted to fool anyone with an Internet connection for more than five seconds. Jennifer, who was really into what our business did, had picked the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so that’s where we were going for a week, with Knuckles and Bull as our employees.

As Jennifer worked through my bag, she asked, “How many companies are there like us?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. A lot. So many that probably only the comptroller or Kurt Hale knows for sure. None have a business like ours, though. All the other companies that I know of are just that—companies full of corporate types. We’re the only one founded and run by operators.”

Jennifer reflexively touched her eye, looking at me with a sad, wistful expression, like a child who had saved forever to buy a toy only to be disappointed in the reality when it arrived at the door, a pale imitation of the TV commercial promises.

“I don’t think anyone in the Taskforce thinks about me that way.”

I regretted my choice of words, because she was right. It would take more than some training and assessment to win them over, but she was on the way. In truth, I respected her abilities greatly, but deep down, even I still harbored a sliver of doubt. I covered it up.

“Bullshit. Knuckles doesn’t feel that way anymore. He’s a believer now. Anyway, who cares what those assholes think? It only matters what you think.”

I changed the subject. “Knuckles will be here any minute. Where do you want to take him for dinner? He’s never been to Charleston.”

“I just figured you’d take him to Red’s Ice House. It’s why you rented this office space in the first place.” She smiled. “So you could walk home.”