The Last Jihad (12 page)

“Then, sir, I believe we need to execute Operation Imminent Cyclone as quickly as possible. That will move the
Nimitz
battle group back into to the Gulf and park the
Roosevelt
and
Reagan
battle groups off the coast of Israel. We’ll move out the 82nd Airborne and Delta Force and get them on the way to Saudi Arabia this morning. The key is to get as many troops and mechanized units and air units in place as we can ASAP.”

She was right. Events were beginning to spiral out of control. Even the graying sixty-seven-year-old vice president—a former Naval Intelligence officer, one-time Virginia governor, four-term U.S. Senator, and long-time chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a solid Washington hand if there ever was one—was beginning to get edgy.

“I agree with all of your recommendations, and so will the president,” the VP began. “But you guys know as well as I do, this isn’t going to be enough. It’s a start. But, look, if Saddam Hussein has decided to go back after Kuwait, or after the Saudis, or after all the Gulf states, Imminent Cyclone isn’t going to stop him. And all of you know it.”

He scanned the room and the video screens on the wall in front of him. No one seemed to disagree.

“We don’t have the forces in place to shut him down quickly. Not if he launches a full-fledged invasion. We can mobilize NATO to come with us—we’ll definitely get the British. Who knows about the French and the Germans? But even if we do get NATO to go with us, we certainly don’t have six or eight months to build up. Saddam could have half the world’s oil supply under his control by the end of the week.”

The team was silent, each principal contemplating the past few hours.

“I am going to go ahead and recommend to the president that we go to a full ground stop. That we immediately call up fifty thousand reservists. And that we execute Imminent Cyclone. But, Tuck, first get back on the phone with the Saudis and get them to ask us.”

“Sir, I…”

“Right now, Mr. Secretary.”

“Sir, obviously I will comply. But I must say for the record that we need to get the president on the line here soon and convene an official meeting of the National Security Council before we proceed much further.”

“We will,” assured the vice president. “You just make sure the Saudis are with us one hundred percent. They’ve been edgy in the past about us being there. And I don’t need to tell you all there have been a lot of strains in our relationship over the past few years. They don’t like U.S. troops—especially women and Christians—anywhere near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But they need us and we need them. We need to make sure we’re all on the same page, fighting the same war. And they need to know we’re not going to abandon them to the likes of Saddam Hussein. We’re not going to undermine their regime like Carter did to the Shah of Iran. And we’re not going to waffle and hedge and run feckless, photo-op foreign policy like Clinton did. We’re dead serious about shutting Saddam Hussein down—and we’re in this for as long as it takes. It’s your job to make that crystal clear, Tuck. You got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“OK. Now, that said, ladies and gentlemen…”

The vice president again scanned the faces of everyone in the room with him, and every face on the video screens on the wall before him.

“I’m going to say it again. This isn’t good enough. The president and I can’t tell the world we
were
winning the war on terrorism—and then lose the Gulf, for crying out loud. We need new options—and we need them fast.”

The vice president sat and stared for a moment at the communications console in front of him. No one knew whether he was done. No one knew quite what to do.

“So much for the victory lap.”

Delays were not uncommon.

They happened all the time, in and out of the two major Vienna railway stations. But this was no typical day. By the time this particular train finally pulled in, twenty U.S. agents—fifteen men and five women, each Arabic-and Russian-speaking—had arrived, been briefed and had taken up positions in each of the train cars most likely to be occupied by the “four horsemen.”

These Iraqis were professionals. Though they didn’t yet know they were being followed, they certainly had no intention of mingling out in the open to be observed and overheard if they were being shadowed. No sooner were they on board with their tickets punched by a conductor than they slipped into their reserved, four-person sleeper compartment and locked the door.

The best the lead CIA agent could do was put a few of his team in the two sleeping berths on either side, and have them attach highly sensitive listening equipment to the walls, connected to digital recording equipment. The rest of his team would assume the roles of waiters, tourists and baggage handlers while he took up his own command and control position with the engineers at the front of the train. The only good news on this leg of the assignment: the four weren’t going anywhere the agents couldn’t go as well, at least not for the next two and a half days.

They all might as well settle in for a long winter’s night.

The American and Israeli agents regrouped.

They walked quietly down an empty corridor. When they reached the end, the man with the gold-rimmed glasses punched a nine-digit pass code into a plastic box on the wall, unlocked a massive steel door, entered, and everyone moved briskly down three flights of stairs. There they showed their IDs to two armed sentries, put their thumbs on a fingerprint identification pad, were cleared, and stepped into a huge, soundproof, blastproof, wood-paneled office packed with TV monitors and computer screens, military aides, and bodyguards—the office of Israeli airport security chief Yitzhak Galit.

Galit didn’t look up as the four men entered and quickly shut the door behind them. He was huddled around a TV screen behind his desk with three other men. One was Yossi Ben Ramon, the head of Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—nervously chain-smoking Winstons. The second was Avi Zadok, head of the Mossad—Israel’s renowned foreign intelligence service—calmly puffing on a thick Cuban cigar. The third was a quiet man named Dietrich Black, head of the FBI counterterrorism team based in Israel, who now poured a Diet Coke into a glass mug filled with ice.

“Well?” said the American who’d just walked in the room.

All eyes looked to Black. But Black—wearing jeans, casual brown shoes, a black T-shirt, and a .45 caliber side arm in a shoulder holster—just stared into his glass and waited for the fizz to subside. Secondhand smoke filled the room with a bluish haze, but no one seemed to mind.

“You know why I drink Diet Coke?” Black asked the room of high-powered spooks as he continued to watch the fizz in his glass go down.

No one had any idea what he was talking about.

“I always hated Diet Coke, stuff tastes like dishwater,” Black continued. “But I had lunch once in Washington with the director of the Bureau at the time. It was in the fall of 1991 and we were having lunch at the Four Seasons with Henry Kissinger.

Zadok glanced at Ben Ramon.

Was this guy losing it?

“So Kissinger ordered a Diet Coke. And then the director ordered a Diet Coke. And I figured, ‘Well, I guess martinis are out.’ So, I figured, what the hell, so I ordered a Diet Coke. ’Cause I figured, you know, Kissinger’s a pretty smart guy. And if he drinks Diet Coke, then I probably should, too. And I’ve been drinking them ever since.”

Black looked up, picked up his glass, and raised it in the air. “Cheers.”

The Israelis in the room burst out laughing—partly out of nervous tension and partly because they had never known quite what to make of Black. As an operative, he impressed them. But as a human being, he amused them no end.

Zadok was the first to catch his breath and light up a new cigar. “You’re a moron, Black,” he told him, with a thick Israeli accent.

“Yeah, but I’m thin.”

“Fine, you’re a thin moron.”

Even Black had to laugh at that.

Six foot three, trim, completely bald (his wife once told him she couldn’t decide if he looked more like Lex Luthor or Mr. Clean), and about to turn fifty, Dietrich Peter Black was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recruited fresh out of Harvard Business School at a time when none of his classmates would ever have even considered a career in law enforcement over one on Wall Street, he loved his job and had never thought twice about having taken it.

Hopscotching the world for most of the 1980s, he’d spent most of the 1990s based in Washington, working on high-profile terrorism cases like the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, the Olympics bombing in Atlanta in 1996, and, of course, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

He was cool, methodical, and virtually devoid of the kind of passion and emotion that can cloud the judgment of a successful investigator. That’s not to say he wasn’t moved with compassion by the deaths of fellow citizens and colleagues. He certainly was. But he seemed to have an instinctual ability to channel that passion into a laserlike focus. He focused on the details and anomalies and idiosyncrasies and discrepancies that turn up in every case and often turn into determinative leads—leads that can turn into fibers that become threads that emanate from finely woven fabric and that can end up unraveling even the most complicated of cases.

“So, Deek, you know, we’re all really intrigued about how you pick soft drinks,” said the man with the yo-yo. “But what’s the deal here, what’s the verdict?”

Black took another sip of the cold, bubbly soda, then turned to the others.

“Avi? How ’bout you?”

Avi Zadok leaned back in his chair and took another puff on his cigar, savoring the taste and the moment. Finally, he broke the suspense.

“To tell you the truth, I believed him,” declared the aging Mossad leader.

Black picked up a half-eaten falafel sandwich sitting on a paper plate beside his Diet Coke, and took a huge bite.

“Yossi?” he asked, his mouth full of pita and hummus.

“Honestly, Deek?” Ben Ramon replied, his accent just as thick as Zadok’s, but betraying his Sephardic Moroccan roots. “I’m afraid I have to agree with Avi.”

Black looked him straight in the eye, and Ben Ramon finished his thought.

“He didn’t know anything.”

“No, it was more than that,” interjected Galit, the airport security chief, suddenly capturing everyone’s attention. “He was actually good. Very good. He was honest.”

“And loyal,” added Ben Ramon.

“Anyone else?” Black asked, eyebrows raised, scanning the room, thick again with nervous tension. No one said a word. Especially not the man with the yo-yo.

Black paced the room, thinking, chewing, assessing the turn of events. He stepped over to the TV on Galit’s desk, picked up the remote and rewound the tape—then played it again without the sound, just watching the face in the center of the screen. He slowly finished his sandwich, and his Diet Coke, then wiped his mouth with a tiny, thin paper napkin and turned back to the rest of the group.

“I agree,” Black finally admitted. “He didn’t know.”

Everyone looked down, quiet and smoking. Then Galit broke the silence.

“You Americans should have recruited him,” he said, nervously looking around the room for agreement.

Then Black smiled.

“We just did.”

The black phone marked “FBI” rang just before 10:30
A.M.
Eastern.

The National Security Advisor picked it up on the first digital ring.

“Kirkpatrick.”

“Prairie Ranch, standby for Black Ops.”

“Orange Grove?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Secure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Put him through.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Hold one.”

Kirkpatrick grabbed a nearby yellow legal pad and a black Sharpie. She pulled the cap off and prepared to take down the message.

“What’s the word?”

“It’s done.”

“And?” she asked.

There was a pause. Then she nodded.

“Thanks. Now clean up and get back here now. Bring everything. You’ll get instructions in the air.”

Kirkpatrick hung up the phone and looked over at the vice president. Everyone else in the room was consumed with other activities. The VP waited for the answer. Kirkpatrick wrote one word on the last page of the yellow legal pad and slid it over to him. He looked down, discreetly peeked at the last page, and nodded his head.

“Clean,” it read.

He picked up the blue phone in the console before him, the one marked “NORAD.”

“Get me the president.”

Black placed a secure phone call from Galit’s office.

“Seventh floor, may I help you?”

“I need to talk to Esther. It’s urgent.”

“One moment please.”

As Black waited, he asked one of the Israeli staffers to pack up everything he’d need for the trip back—including Bennett’s body.

“Ambassador’s office. Esther speaking.”

“Esther, it’s Deek.”

“Hey, Deek, you OK?”

“I need the DCM.”

“He’s on a call.”

“
Now
, Esther.”

“All right. Hold on.”

Black opened a new Diet Coke. On one TV, he watched the Sky News replays of the attack on the presidential motorcade, and the attacks in London and Paris and Saudi Arabia. On another TV, he watched CNN replay excerpts from a press conference with White House Press Secretary Chuck Murray at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

“I need Bennett’s cell phone and BlackBerry,” he told Galit. “And I need your guys to crack the pass codes fast.”

Galit nodded. One of his men scrambled off to make it happen. Just then, Tom Ramsey—the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv—came on the line.

“Deek?”

“Hey, Tom, it’s me.”

“You need the ambassador’s plane.”

“How’d you know?”

“Checkmate just called.”

“What about Paine? You need his clearance?” asked Black.