Mission Compromised (72 page)

Newman watched as Samir turned and walked away, toward the center of town, where he could make a telephone call to his father to come and get him. As Samir disappeared behind a building, out of Newman's sight, the tough Marine felt a catch in his throat and knew that this loving, trusting man really was going to pray for him. He was overwhelmed.

Newman followed the women through the corridor of the railway coach. They had third-class tickets, and the coaches to which they were assigned were old and smelled of sweat, mildew, and animals. He followed them into a compartment where they could all sit together. The women sat on one side and he sat with the girls on the other side. He lifted the smaller girl onto his lap so she could see outside, just as the conductor was coming through to take their tickets. Newman took the tickets from the hands of the girls, put them with his own, then handed them to the grandmother. She held them with the others, outstretched for the conductor. Newman managed to keep looking outside, pointing to some camels for the girl to see. She began talking in her own language, excitedly, and he pretended interest and excitement, but without words.

With practiced boredom, the blue-uniformed conductor took the tickets from the grandmother, tore them in half, used an ancient hand punch to punch a square hole through all five stubs, and handed the punched paper sheets back to the oldest child. The blue uniform then moved off down the corridor beside the compartments, through the coach, and into the next one.
One hurdle passed
, Newman thought.

The train was moving fast on its way to Aleppo. Samir had told him that the trip to Aleppo, including stops, would take four hours and that they would have a one-hour layover in Aleppo for the train change to Elbeyli, Turkey. Newman hoped that the train was able to stay on schedule. Samir had told him that there was a midnight train from Elbeyli to Iskenderun.
If all goes well, I'll be in Iskenderun by two o'clock in the morning
, thought Newman as the stark, barren desert flashed by outside their open window.

The little girl had relaxed and sat back in Newman's lap; she soon
fell asleep. Her mother looked over and gestured as if to say, “Shall I take her from you?”

Newman smiled and shook his head. He sat back, cradled the girl against his chest, and rested his head against the window jamb, pretending to be asleep himself. Soon pretense gave way to reality, and he was sound asleep.

He didn't even wake up when the train stopped at As Salhabiyah, just east of the great Assad hydroelectric dam, and more passengers got aboard. Two heavily-armed militiamen boarded and moved from car to car, searching for a fugitive terrorist. With their weapons in front of them, and their fingers beside their triggers, they started at the front of each coach and began inspecting the papers of each traveler. In some cases, they even stopped to ask a series of questions: “Where are you going? Where do you live? What is your father's name?” And they asked, “Have you seen this man?” One of the armed men held out a copy of a poster describing the crime committed by Gilbert Duncan. In the center of the sheet was a picture of Peter Newman. No one questioned had seen the beardless man in the picture.

The train engineer blew two short blasts of the horn just as the soldiers reached the seats of Newman and his companions. One soldier reached for the identity papers from the grandmother. The soldier asked her where she was going and if they were all traveling together. She answered that they were going to Aleppo, and the soldiers seemed content with her answer. They joked about her daughter's husband, sound asleep with their little girl on his lap. There were several more passengers to check, and the two soldiers moved on as the train whistle sounded again—this time a longer, single blast: the signal that the train was about to depart.

The sound startled Newman, who woke up. He heard two men talking in the corridor outside the compartment, their tone officious. Newman resumed his sleeping pose. In another moment, the soldiers exited the rear of the coach and joined other soldiers standing on the wooden platform of the train station. Then Newman heard someone on the platform blow a whistle, and the train began to slowly move forward.

He decided that he would not fall asleep again, no matter how tired he was. He also hoped that the station in Aleppo would not have troops checking the train's departing passengers.

None of them noticed the large, heavyset man in European clothing who had boarded the train at As Salhabiyah.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Aboard the
Pescador

________________________________________

Eastern Mediterranean Sea

30 Nm NE of Cape Andreas

Thursday, 9 March 1995

1230 Hours, Local

 

T
he big blue hull cut like a knife through the gentle swells. With both the mainsail and the jib perfectly trimmed on the slightly raked seventy-two-foot mast, the twenty-knot wind out of the north-northwest had the sixty-two-foot-long sloop just slightly heeled to starboard. The white-haired, deeply-tanned man at the helm checked his gauges and instruments and estimated.
If this wind holds all the way, I may make it to Iskenderun before 1800 hours.

He scanned the horizon, checked his GPS, and put a tic mark on the chart with a notation, “1230,” in pencil, verified that the Northstar
Auto-helm was engaged, and after scanning the horizon one more time, got up and went below.

Standing at the chart table in the navigation cabin of the vessel, he again picked up the hard copies of the e-mails he had started receiving shortly after midnight, just a little over twelve hours ago.

The first contact had been through an e-mail message from Oliver North while the vessel had been at its berth, tied at pier 3 of the Royal Navy facility in Larnaca Bay, Cyprus. When North's e-mail had arrived with its “Urgent” heading, it had made the laptop computer on the chart table emit a series of electronic chirps until the light came on in the cabin and the “Read Mail” icon had been clicked. North's electronic communiqué had asked the sixty-four-year-old captain of the sloop to call another old and mutual friend, Lieutenant General George Grisham—and provided a number.

The satellite phone call to General Grisham had produced more e-mails and a request that he contact Brigadier General James Harris at the NATO Air Base at Incirlik, Turkey. Harris had then sent three e-mails of his own to the laptop in the sloop.

All these electronic exchanges in the middle of the night had prompted the captain to don his foul weather gear, climb up on deck, and commence preparations for getting underway. First he started the engine and when the big diesel began to idle smoothly in its compartment, he had jumped onto the pier, disconnected the shore power that charged the boat's batteries, untied the spring lines, then the fore deck line and finally the stern line, tossing each aboard the boat as he did so. Then, belying his sixty-four years, he had given the transom of the fifty-thousand-pound boat a healthy shove to push the stern of the vessel away from the pier. Then he jumped aboard like someone more athletic and fifteen or more years younger.

Back in the cockpit he had turned the helm hard to port, put the transmission into “Reverse” and slowly eased the throttle up until the boat's single large brass screw bit into the water and backed the big sloop away from the pier. Once he was clear of the pilings, the man at the helm throttled down, pushed the transmission lever forward to “Neutral” and then to “Forward.” He again eased the throttle forward, straightened the rudder and the engine quietly pushed the vessel out into the darkened harbor. From his station at the helm he turned on the radar, his running lights, depth gauge, GPS, knot meter, auto-pilot and the wind measuring instruments mounted high on the mast above his head. Then, as he headed for the breakwater at the entrance of the harbor, he picked up the handset of the ship-to-shore radio, pressed the “Transmit” button and once the harbormaster responded, said simply, “Sailing vessel
Pescador
departing Larnaca enroute to Iskenderun, Turkey; Echo Tango Alpha, nineteen hundred hours, today, over.”

The harbormaster acknowledged the message and Goode replaced the radio handset.

He had motored for less than an hour and a half until he cleared Cape Greco and then, after testing the wind speed and direction, he had decided to set the sails. He came up momentarily into the wind and pushed the buttons for the roller-reefed main and jib, then, as they deployed, he turned back to the right and let them fill. With the bow of the
Pescador
pointed for the mouth of Iskenderun bay on a heading of 040 degrees, he had expertly trimmed the sails, set the auto-helm, gone forward and stowed his dock lines, and gone below to make a pot of coffee.

Now, standing in front of the chart table, the sun was directly overhead and he was halfway to Iskenderun, making eleven knots under full sail with the engine adding a bit of a boost to what the breeze offered.
Goode once more read the e-mailed requests he had received from North and the two generals before leaving Larnaca. His dark brown eyes scanned the documents in front of him. Several of them he shuffled, comparing one message with another.

Grisham's first e-mail was very straightforward: a Marine officer named Newman was in serious trouble and trying to escape from Iraq through Syria. An Air Force general named Harris at the NATO Air Command at Incirlik had details and was expecting to hear from the captain of the
Pescador.

General Harris had filled in the details of how Newman's UN mission had gone awry, about the Interpol poster with Newman's face and the name “Gilbert Duncan.” A later e-mail from Harris had instructed Newman to proceed to the 25 Piers area in Iskenderun rather than take the risk of being apprehended as Duncan by Turkish authorities while trying to make it back to Incirlik.

Subsequent messages from General Grisham spelled out the Marine general's flight plan—and intention to be at the British base in Larnaca when the
Pescador
returned from Iskenderun—hopefully with Newman aboard. General Harris had provided the details of what he had told Newman in his last EncryptionLok-3 phone call about meeting his rescuers at the pier number that corresponded to the day of the month. And a final e-mail from Grisham before he took off from Andrews AFB had provided a satellite phone number for contact, and the advisory that he was bringing Newman's wife with him. What none of the messages could tell him was the answer to the uncertainty that nagged him now: who sabotaged this mission?

The white-haired captain of the
Pescador
had spent most of his adult life answering for others the question: “Who is the enemy?” And
once again, as had happened to him back in 1986, he did not know the answer—and neither did the people with whom he was working now.

He gathered up the printed copies of the e-mails, and after assuring himself he had memorized all the important details, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, he began running them one at a time through the small shredder beneath the chart table. When he reached the one on the bottom, the first message he had received, he looked at it, shook his head, and smiled. It was addressed very simply:

FROM:   NARNIA FARM, OLIVER L. NORTH, LTCOL USMC (RET)

TO:         SAILING VESSEL PESCADOR FOR WILLIAM P. GOODE

 

Taurus Express Station

________________________________________

Aleppo, Syria

Thursday, 9 March 1995

1600 Hours, Local

 

As the train pulled into the Aleppo station, Newman was relieved to realize it was exactly on time. The next moments would be critical. The little girls had napped most of the way, but for the past half hour, they had been playing with a couple of tiny dolls and talking softly with each other as they sat, polite and well-behaved, beside him.

When the train stopped, the women reached for their belongings and stood up to get off the coach. Newman picked up the smaller girl and carried her off the train, holding the hand of the other little girl and helping her down the steep stairs. The two women trailed behind, but they all stayed in a cluster and looked like a typical Middle Eastern family—at least Newman hoped so.

He saw the soldiers when he stepped off the train. There were several of them. This time they were only stopping people at random; some were questioned, and others were being shown the poster with his
photograph prominently positioned in the middle. The two women separated and took up positions on either side of him. The mother took the other hand of her daughter, and they all crowded close together. They passed the first soldiers without receiving so much as a glance. Several other Syrian soldiers manned a second checkpoint, at the platform entrance. One looked directly at Newman, and smiled when the little girl in Newman's arms waved at him. Newman and his “family” went inside the train station, and the grandmother pointed to a nearby bench. They sat in the large waiting room while the older woman purchased their five tickets to Elbeyli and Newman's single ticket to Iskenderun. When she came back she handed them out with a smile.