Allah's Scorpion (19 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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CHEVY CHASE
McGarvey stopped for a moment at the head of the stairs, as his six-month-old granddaughter, Audrey, giggled in the kitchen. It was nine thirty, well past her normal bedtime, but Elizabeth and Todd hadn’t been able to come over until past seven, and Katy wouldn’t have allowed them through the front door if they hadn’t brought the baby.
When he’d gotten home a little before one this afternoon, Katy had searched his face to find out if he was done. What she’d seen hadn’t pleased her. She knew without asking that her husband’s return from the field was temporary; he was on the hunt. He had the old look: lean, hungry, determined.
But they’d made the best of the afternoon because the kids were coming for a late dinner and they were bringing the baby, and she was the joy in their lives that they’d all desperately needed for a long time.
Adkins had called around four, wanting McGarvey to come to the Building first thing in the morning. He hadn’t pressed for any details, but he’d broadly hinted that the operation was far from over.
“Someone will have to go after Graham,” McGarvey had agreed. “I don’t think he’s a man who quits easily.”
“There’s more,” Adkins had said.
McGarvey had chuckled. “There always is.”
The house was in complete disarray. Boxes were stacked everywhere, waiting for the movers who were supposed to come on Thursday. Furniture was tagged, paintings, pictures, and mirrors were off the walls and crated, and his study had been completely disassembled.
They’d bought this house ten years ago for $350,000, just before he and Katy had split up and he’d run to Switzerland. They’d put it on the market two months ago, and it had sold in two days for $l.9 million—$200,000 more than they were asking.
Coming downstairs, he was suddenly struck by his history here. It was from this place that he and Katy had ended their marriage, and it had been here that they’d reunited.
But there had also been bad things. His wife and daughter had been placed in harm’s way, more than once. And just outside across the street his bodyguard and friend, Dick Yemm, had been assassinated.
Time to head for sunnier climes. Time to get back to teaching, and back to the book on Voltaire that he’d been writing for several years.
But first there was one remaining task, other than Graham. Something he should have done in 2000 when he’d had the opportunity. In many respects the failure to stop 9/11 was as much his fault as it was anyone else’s.
This time he would not stop until he had personally put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s brain.
He went down the stair hall and into the kitchen, where Audrey in her high chair had been pulled up to the counter and was eating her dinner. She had strained beets in her hair, her ears, her eyes, and in the creases of her neck.
Katy looked up. “Did you find the camera?”
McGarvey shook his head. “It’s in one of the boxes. I couldn’t find it.”
“Don’t worry, Mother, Audie does this with every meal,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll send pictures.”
“Your granddaughter is a slob, Mrs. M,” Todd said.
Katy smiled. “So was your wife.”
“She still is,” Todd added.
Liz shot a playful slap at him when the telephone rang.
Katy answered it, and her smile faded. “Of course,” she said, and hung up. She looked at Mac. “Otto’s just pulling into our driveway. Says it’s urgent.”
It had to be about Graham. Rencke had been working the problem around the clock ever since he’d come down to Sarasota to ask Mac to take the job.
“I’ll try to make it short,” McGarvey told his wife, then went to the front door to let the CIA’s director of Special Projects in.
Rencke had brought a young, good-looking woman with him. “Gloria Ibenez,” he introduced her. “She’s one of our field officers working the bin Laden search. And, oh boy, you just gotta hear what she came up with.”
She shook hands with McGarvey. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, sir.” She glanced at the boxes stacked in the stair hall. “You’re leaving?”
“In a few days,” McGarvey said. He ushered them into his study, where the walls and shelves had been stripped bare, and shut the door. All the chairs had been boxed, so there was nowhere to sit.
“It’s not over, Mac,” Otto gushed. He hopped from one foot to the other, his face animated. “It fact it’s just starting. The canal gig was bonus time; it wasn’t the real Allah’s Scorpion.”
“What are you talking about?” McGarvey asked. He’d had the feeling from the moment he knew Graham’s target was the canal and not someplace in the United States that there would be more.
“I finally got Graham’s navy file. The
full
file. His wife died while he
was at sea on patrol, and his boss never notified him. Pissed him off and he went all to hell. Drinking, making really bad decisions that put his crew’s lives in jeopardy, that kinda shit.”
“We figured as much,” McGarvey said.
“But here’s the kicker, Mac, and, honest injun, this is the big one. Guess what Graham’s job was in the navy. Just guess.”
“What?”
“He was a Perisher graduate,” Otto gushed. “Top of his class.”
“Submarines,” McGarvey said in wonder.
“Bingo!” Otto cried. “He was a sub driver, and a damned good one from his early fitreps.” He glanced at Gloria. “But it’s even better than that.”
“I was in Guantanamo Bay last week, interrogating prisoners,” she said. “My partner and I stumbled into the middle of a prison break. We think it was al-Quaida trying to spring five guys. Iranians. When they were cornered they killed themselves rather than risk being recaptured.”
“Her partner was killed too,” Otto said gently.
“The five guys they were trying to grab were all ex-Iranian navy,” Gloria said. “And for some reason, which no one down there wanted to talk about, they weren’t in Camp Delta. They were in the minimum-security lockup for prisoners ready to be released back to their home countries.”
“Al-Quaida is planning to grab a sub somewhere, and hit us hard,” Otto said. “They’ve got the captain, and they’re searching for a crew.”
McGarvey had been watching Gloria’s eyes. There was a sadness there, and something else. “Sorry about your partner,” he said. “But are you trying to tell me that al-Quaida had help down there? Someone on our side?”
“I think so,” Gloria said. “It would mean that someone in the organization has a direct pipeline to the camp. I want to go back and find out. It could very well lead us to bin Laden himself.”
“I’m going with you,” McGarvey said. Gitmo would probably be difficult, he thought, but nowhere near as difficult as it was going to be when he told Katy.
“Yes, sir,” Gloria said, obviously impressed and pleased.
“I’ll come out to the Building first thing in the morning,” McGarvey told Otto. “See if you can come up with the names of any other of the prisoners who might have navy backgrounds.”
“Will do.”
“And put together everything you got not only on Graham, but on bin Laden.”
“Oh, boy,” Otto said, hopping from one foot to the other, and clapping his hands. “The bad guys are going down.”
 
 
KARACHI, PAKISTAN
Rupert Graham reached Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport via Paris around eight in the evening aboard a battered Pakistan International Airlines 727 that had to have been thirty years old. As they came in for the landing, most of the Muslim passengers aboard took out their prayer beads and closed their eyes. A good many of them believed that their prayers were
all
that kept PIA’s aging fleet in the air.
Except for security concerns, Graham had been all but mindless of his surroundings since he’d left San José yesterday morning. He was seething inside because of his failure, and now arriving in Pakistan he was beginning to feel like a junior ensign being called before the skipper for a Captain’s Mast disciplinary action.
Yet something of what bin Laden had said during their brief telephone conversation kept repeating in his head, booming like a drum calling him to battle.
Allah’s Scorpion. Something much better, something more suitable to your training.
Graham, dressed in a charcoal-gray business suit, his hair and eyebrows light again, the soft brown contacts gone, the lift shoes discarded, shuffled down the corridor with the other passengers to immigration, where he showed his Australian passport, which identified him as forty-one-year-old Talbot Barry, from Sydney, here to write a piece for a travel magazine.
He was passed through without question, but when he retrieved his single hanging bag and presented it at customs, two armed officers and a drug-sniffing dog conducted a thorough search not only of the bag, but of his body. Through it all he kept his composure, cooperating completely, and even smiling.
Pakistan had been granted the most favored nation status by the United
States and was getting a lot of aid. As a result, Islamabad was doing everything in its power to keep up the illusion that it was actively seeking out terrorists, especially the remnants of the Taliban, as well as al-Quaida and specifically bin Laden, who was supposedly hiding out in the mountains of the far northwest.
When his bag was finally stamped and he was given an entry pass, he marched through the busy terminal and outside, where a dark Mercedes S500 with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. Graham got into the backseat and the driver, a bulky dark-complected man in a business suit, pulled smoothly out into traffic and without a word headed into the city.
“Were you followed?” the driver asked, in English, his voice low, menacing. He was one of bin Laden’s chief bodyguards and gofers.
It was an extremely rude question, but one that Graham could philosophically understand because of his failure in Panama. “I was not.”
It was a weekday and the traffic volume was heavy the nearer they got to downtown, especially in the broad band of slums they had to pass through. But Graham was again lost in thought, only subliminally noticing his surroundings.
He’d been born and raised in the Collyhurst slum of Manchester, his father a collier and his mother a laundress. Early on he’d learned to defend himself from the other boys, because he was small for his age.
There was never enough money, and yet he showed an early promise in grammar school, so on the advice of the schoolmaster, and a scholarship, they managed to scrape together enough money to let him finish through college prep.
Of course college was completely out of the question, financially, so Graham had joined the Royal Navy and was sent to Dounreay in Scotland to learn nuclear engineering, graduating number five in his class of fifty.
From there he received his primary submarine officer’s training, graduating first in his class, and was sent out into the fleet.
A century ago, he reflected. A completely different lifetime, because in those days he’d had legitimacy, a pride in what he was doing. There had been more schooling, more promotions, new ships, new mates, new adventures.
And throughout it all, almost from the beginning had been Jillian; dear, sweet, pixie-faced Jillian whom he had loved with every fiber of his being.
He closed his eyes, a frown crossing his features. There had been two incidents during Perisher before he’d been given command of his own sub, in which the old man had taken him aside for a word in private.
Jillian had been admitted to the base hospital twice in three months; the first with cracked ribs and a lot of bruising on her arms and chest, and the second with a fractured left arm and three teeth knocked out. In both incidents she’d told the emergency room doctors that she was clumsy and had fallen down the cellar stairs.
But it wasn’t true, and although no one had believed her stories, nothing could be done. The old man had counseled Graham on anger management during times of extreme stress.
“You’ll need your wits about you if you should suddenly find yourself in a dicey situation a dozen miles off some Russian peninsula in the Barents Sea. Can’t be losing your head. Your men will be watching your every move.”
The thing was, he could no longer remember the incidents in any great detail, nor could he bring up an image of Jillian’s face in his mind. It frightened him.
But what was permanently etched in his brain was the fact that the same man who had counseled him on anger management had not sent the recall message so that Graham could get back from sea in time to be at Jillian’s side when she died.
Afterwards he’d demanded that the staff judge advocate’s office investigate. But his request had been denied. Admiral Woodrow S. B. Holmes had acted well within the responsibilities of his office by not recalling a nuclear submarine on patrol for the sake of a personal problem, no matter how high-ranking the officer was, nor how serious the problem was. The needs of the Royal Navy had to come first.
In the heart of the city’s business and banking district the Mercedes turned onto M. R. Kayani Road and two blocks later entered a secured underground parking garage that served the forty-eight-story M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre.
Graham had only been here twice before, and he thought that it was a great irony that bin Laden had been hiding out in Pakistan’s largest city all along, when the entire world, especially the American CIA, believed he was somewhere in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan.
Five levels down the driver pulled up at an elevator, but he didn’t get
out to open the car door for Graham. “You may go directly up. He is expecting you.”
“Will you wait for me?” Graham asked. The driver was looking at him in the rearview mirror.
“That will be up to him.”
“Very well,” Graham said. He let himself out of the car, got his bag, and walked across to the elevator, which automatically started up. A closed-circuit camera mounted near the ceiling was trained on him. Security in this building was very tight because of all the wealthy business tenants. No one who didn’t belong here got in or out. Ever.
But an even more delicious irony was that a small international investments company on the tenth floor that handled money transactions for the Afghanistan heroin trade was, in fact, a front for a CIA special mission station. Only a very few people in Pakistan’s secret intelligence service knew about it, or its purpose, which was to find and eliminate Afghanistan’s drug overlords as well as the handlers along the pipeline to the United States.
The elevator came to a halt on the twenty-fifth floor and Graham stepped out into a plushly carpeted entry hall, across which was a single door. An old man in Western dress was there.
“Good evening, Captain Graham,” the old man said. He was one of bin Laden’s inner circle, though Graham had never been told his name.
“Will I be staying here tonight, or have hotel arrangements been made for me?”
“You will remain here, with us, for the time being,” the old man said. He was frail and his voice was pleasantly soft, but there was no warmth in his eyes or his manner. “Come with me.”
Graham followed the old man into the suite of offices and living spaces, down a long corridor to a small room in approximately the center of the building. Furnished only with an Oriental rug and a small television set on a tiny round table, the space was lit by a single small-wattage bulb that hung from the ceiling. There were no woven hangings, pictures, or any other adornments on the walls, nor were there windows. This was the inner sanctum, where bin Laden prayed five times per day, where he watched CNN, once in the morning and once each evening, and where he held the most secret of his meetings.
“Wait here,” the old man said, and he withdrew.
Graham dropped his garment bag in the corner, slipped off his shoes, and sat cross-legged on the edge of the rug.
Both times he’d been called to this place he’d met with bin Laden in this room, but never before had he stayed in the building for more than an hour. All of his other planning sessions with the man had been conducted via encrypted e-mail or encrypted satellite phone or, once in person, at the training camp in the Syrian Desert.
And at each meeting bin Laden had greeted him like an old friend, a long-lost brother. Graham suspected that this time it would be different. The mission had failed and he knew that he would be blamed, though he strongly suspected that the leak had come from someone here in Pakistan, or more likely someone from the Syrian training camp.
There was a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head, but no one who knew the man’s real location would ever reveal it. He would not live to collect the money, let alone spend it. But feeding the American authorities information about al-Quaida missions was becoming a high-stakes cottage industry. In practical terms it meant that only a very select few men were allowed to know the whole picture of any mission.
Graham decided that if nothing else happened he would find the traitor and personally slit his throat.
A clean-shaven bin Laden, dressed in khaki slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt, entered the room. Graham started to get to his feet, but bin Laden waved him back. “It is good that you have returned unharmed. You may consider yourself lucky.”
“Who was he?”
Bin Laden sat down on the rug and faced Graham. “His name is Kirk McGarvey.”
Graham allowed a look of wonder to cross his face. “He was the director of the CIA.”
“Yes, but more than that he is an assassin.”
“The Americans no longer do that sort of thing … .”
“You’re a submarine commander, not an intelligence officer, so your error is understandable,” bin Laden said mildly. “And now you are the second man to come to me a failure against McGarvey.”
“Where is the other?”
“He tried again and died,” bin Laden said.
“I’m not so easy to kill,” Graham said, irritated.
“I sincerely hope not. But McGarvey is not your problem. You will remain here until he is eliminated.”
Graham’s anger spiked. He sat forward. “I want him,” he said sharply.
Bin Laden was unmoved. “If he sees you again he will kill you,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen. I have another use for you.”
“What?”
“In due time, my friend. Do not let your anger and impatience get the better of you. Not if you wish to continue your
jihad
against the godless men who abused your trust so harshly.”
“You said it was a mission more suited to my training,” Graham said. “Can you at least tell me if it involves a submarine?”
Bin Laden looked at him for a long time, before he finally nodded, the gesture so slight it was almost unnoticeable.
A thrill coursed through Graham like a hit of cocaine to a desperate man. All of his training had been for one purpose, and one purpose alone; to command an underwater warship. To train a crew and lead his men into battle. All other considerations were secondary: pain, fear, conscience, ego. Even love.
“Until the mission preparation fully develops you will remain here at my side.”
“I should be involved in the planning,” Graham said. “For God’s sake, I’m a trained sub driver. I have the knowledge.”
“Yes, which is exactly why you will not be allowed to leave this place until the time is correct,” bin Laden said. “You are too valuable an asset to risk.”
“Then why was I sent on the canal strike?” Graham demanded.
“Because I wasn’t sure that we could get a boat,” bin Laden said.
“My God, you’ve done it? You’ve got a sub?”
“In due time,” bin Laden said. “Now leave me, I wish to be alone. Salaam will show you to your quarters.”
Graham got up, retrieved his bag and shoes, and left the room without another word. His mind was alive with the possibilities that another command would give him. The entire world would be his, and he meant to take it.
By the time he was finished, the damage would be incalculable.

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