The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (20 page)

“Al Qaeda and these other groups have relatively small numbers,” Warsaw continued. “In the entire world, certainly no more than between 60,000 and 70,000 committed individuals. The leadership is made up of perhaps five per cent of that number. They succeed in part because of the insurmountable odds of finding a few absolutely committed terrorists hiding among six billion ordinary, law-abiding human beings. In a nutshell, that’s the essence of the asymmetry.”

“We’re dealing with tens of thousands of ships,” Wheatley said, “and literally millions of these standardized intermodal shipping containers. We’ll surely track down these fifty boxes Feldman has tagged, but what if it slipped through? There are two hundred million standardized metal 40-foot and 20-foot boxes in the world today, and ten million of them come into the U.S. every year. More than three hundred American ports are equipped to load and unload container ships.”

“I’ve always been haunted by the fear that when—and I say when, not if—the nuclear bomb comes to America,” Warsaw said, “it won’t be dropped from a plane or launched at the pointed end of a missile. Rather, it will be stuffed in an ocean-going container along with a shipment of textiles, plastic, and cheap electronics from some country we’ve never thought of, all wrapped, perhaps, in lead foil. Even a low-yield nuclear device detonated in a big U.S. port, all of which are surrounded by major population centers, would make 9/11 look like a minor event.”

“And I suppose that if terrorists are really willing to push their luck, they will risk unloading the container onto a ‘semi’ and then drive it anywhere they want, even up Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“There is one thing working in your favor,” Warsaw said, “and that’s statistics. You can use statistics to turn the terrorists’ overwhelming mathematical advantage on its head.”

“How so?”

“Well, this is just the germ of an idea, but let me tell you a story: Before the
USS Cole
bombing, a Coast Guard captain was told of a plot to attack one of our aircraft carriers, I think it may have been the
USS Yorktown
, the next morning when she sailed into Norfolk harbor. He had to devise in a few hours a plan to prevent the attack. How to proceed?

“Chesapeake Bay is full of small private craft,” Warsaw continued. “It would be impossible, from a resource point of view, to check out all these hundreds of boats, any one of which, if suitably armed, could easily blow a hole in the side of an aircraft carrier, a vessel that is very costly and incredibly vulnerable.”

“So what did he do?”

“He turned the problem on its head. The morning the aircraft carrier sailed out of the Atlantic, he stationed coast guard cutters at all five entrances to the lower Chesapeake Bay with orders to bar those sea-lanes to
all
traffic, including legitimate traffic. He turned the lower bay into a quarantined zone, on the theory that once he had deterred the huge majority of friendly boats, any unfriendly boats remaining would stick out like a lighthouse.

“And of course, in the event, no one attacked the aircraft carrier. There was probably nothing to the plot in the first place, but what I thought was fascinating about the strategy, from a game theory perspective, was how by changing the focus from the near-impossible problem of identifying the single bad actor to the very manageable problem of identifying the large masses of good actors, he turned the puzzle upside down and found a way to do what no one thought could be done.”

“OK, it’s a great story,” Wheatley agreed. “But how do I apply it to my case?”

Warsaw laughed. “I have no idea,” he said. “But it’s a start, don’t you think? And by the way, this may be just the right time for another dram of that very excellent cognac of yours?”

“Karachi is not merely a city, it is a galaxy of humanity, a self-contained universe of civilization. Twenty millions live in the metropolitan area, occupying an urban port city that was already ancient when Alexander the Great paused here after conquering the Indus River Valley to prepare for his campaign in Babylon.”

The speaker was the British-educated and well-tailored Pakistani administrator of the Karachi Port Trust, an institution established in the 19th century and housed in a domed sandstone palace larger than the capitols of half the American states. The administrator’s office could easily have accommodated a basketball court.

Brigadier Mahmood and Kate Langley had traveled to Karachi the night before in an unmarked Learjet provided by the ISI, Kate using her alias as an American representative of a humanitarian NGO. They were in Pakistan’s largest city with a clearly defined task: to find that malignant radioactive object hiding amid a vast array of benign containers, not unlike searching for that cancerous cell lurking among the trillions of healthy cells in a human patient.

What the self-important Karachi bureaucrat was saying did not give Kate much comfort. His point was that every innovation in cargo transport since the North Carolina trucker Malcolm McLean invented standardized intermodal containers for his aptly named
‘Sea-Land’
company in 1955 was geared toward better speed and efficiency at lower cost. Security was a secondary issue, at best.

The most popular seals for freight containers cost about 50 cents each and were easily opened. They were designed not to prevent theft but merely to record that the container had been breached. Annual loss from cargo pilfering in Karachi alone was upwards of $750 million.

“Do you know, my dear brigadier,” the port administrator was saying, “that only the year before last one of our officers patrolling the container docks in the night heard the sound of singing and laughing coming from a stack of intermodals aboard a ship recently in from Aden? When he summoned reinforcements and opened the sea box, he was astonished to find within a well-dressed Yemeni completely intoxicated on khat! This chap had been at sea in the container for five days. He was equipped with food, water, a laptop computer, satellite phone, bunk bed, toilet, and battery powered electric light and fan—he had made inconspicuous air holes in the corners.”

“That doesn’t say much for port security,” Mahmood said dryly.

“Well, we caught him, didn’t we?” the administrator said. “He was found to have a chart of Karachi harbor, airport maps, security badges from several countries and a certificate as an able seaman.”

“So you arrested him?” Kate asked.

“Of course. But after a hearing in which he claimed that he was escaping political persecution—a doubtful assertion given that he had a valid German passport—our magistrate ordered him released on bail.”

“And?”

“I’m afraid he’s disappeared. Though we’ve sequestered the container. I can show it to you.”

“If something as vulnerable and fragile as a human being can be successfully concealed in an intermodal freight container,” Kate said, “what does that say about the ease with which a weaponized nuke, which is not fragile, could be shipped?”

“The discovery of our stowaway was not a big shock to us, I must admit,” the administrator said. “Smuggling, organized crime, drugs, counterfeits, stowaways—these are the permanent liabilities of our business. We do not care what we ship so much as where it is going, how quickly, and how much it will cost. I am not a policeman, only a businessman. The government is in charge of keeping us safe.”

“We appreciate your giving us the run of the port,” Kate said. The administrator clearly was not going to be much more help.

Brigadier Mahmood stood up and strode toward the door.

“Imagine what will happen to the global shipping industry if a ‘bomb in a box’ goes off somewhere—anywhere in the world,” Mahmood said coldly, facing the administrator. “Every port in Europe and America will be closed. I imagine the Port of Karachi would shut down to a standstill, too. How much would that cost you? And how long might it take for the gears to start turning again and for shipping to resume?”

***

Outside in the plaza fronting the administration building, they took a military staff car to the principal container wharf of the port, the Karachi International Container Terminal, a long mole that curved against the sea wall. Even from land, one could see that Karachi provided shippers with a wonderfully protected natural harbor.

“There are two ways we can go with this,” Kate said. “First is to track every container that passed through the Cargo Inspection System in the hour when it signaled a radiation alert. That will take time, and since those containers are already at sea, it will involve alerting authorities in other nations.”

“Which would risk a worldwide panic,” Mahmood said. “What is your other approach?”

“We know that the bomb was not brought into Pakistan in an intermodal. The roads from Uzbekistan through Afghanistan just aren’t designed for it.”

“Which means that the cargo would have had to be transferred into an intermodal here at the port.”

“Precisely. Or somewhere else here in Karachi.”

“But consider that Al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda have had ten years to develop a fleet of small freighters,” Mahmood objected, “maybe even dhows and junks, sailing on the dark fringes of the legitimate cargo transport industry. Why would they use a commercial shipper and draw attention to themselves?”

“Because dhows and junks can’t sail into major Western ports,” Kate said. “It’s possible that a small freighter could be used to move a weapon to some other third world port, but if they want to sail to Amsterdam or New York, eventually they will have to make the transition to the standard intermodal container. Why not here and get it done at the outset?”

“That makes eminent sense,” Mahmood agreed. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to identify the transit shipping agents who have the facilities to make such transfers, and that is something here totally under my control, an avenue we can pursue immediately rather than sending alerts all over the world that will surely incite alarm.”

“We probably have to do both,” Kate said, “and hope that our research here bears fruit, but be prepared in case it doesn’t”

“I would like to see the Cargo Inspection System unit while we are here,” Mahmood said. “Perhaps we will learn something beyond what was reported in Islamabad.”

The CIS inspection station was in the central part of the enormous KICT—the Karachi International Container Terminal. A lieutenant in the regular Army was waiting for Mahmood and saluted smartly when he arrived.

The CIS mechanism used to screen the intermodal containers was like an oversized magnetic scanner at the airport. The containers were moved through a central opening by a tractor conveyor belt. The young lieutenant explained that the CIS unit contained receptors to pick up radiation. It also had a high-powered gamma ray generator that was capable of sending a beam through thick metal and producing a photographic outline image of the contents of the box. A port technician explained the operation of the device, indicating that it took CIS about 45 seconds to scan each container—when it was working.

“And even that is a long time, in terms of the volume of cargo that goes through a port of this size,” he said. “If we were to inspect by hand the containers on just a single large container ship, it would occupy us for a year or more.”

“Do you ever open the containers?” Kate asked.

“Yes, if we get an anomalous reading, or if the X-Ray looks suspicious.”

“I’m still not clear on how you got an alert on the box two days ago yet were unable to isolate the container,” Mahmood said.

“Sir, this is a high tech tool working in a low tech environment. All sorts of things can destabilize the sensors, especially vibrations, and the backup power units have been so overloaded because of Karachi’s erratic power that they often fail. What appears to have happened is that the container went through, registered a reading, and then CIS shut down before alerting the operator.”

“So when the CIS machine shuts down, do you stop the inspections and just let the boxes through?” Mahmood inquired.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s what we did before CIS was invented, and when the machine isn’t working, we have no choice. We can’t shut down the port.”

“Actually, I am fully prepared to shut down this port, if the need arises,” Mahmood said curtly.

Kate’s Blackberry buzzed. It was Mort Feldman’s assistant in Islamabad. Karachi police had found a dead body, one of three that day. This one was just yards from where Kate and Brigadier Mahmood were standing.

***

The decomposing corpse was that of a male of indeterminate age, clean-shaven, perhaps an Afghan though he was dressed in paramilitary khaki clothes and wore laced jungle boots. He had been strangled with a ligature and left under a burlap tarp in the warehouse of the international shipping agent, Global-Modal Asia Limited, in the East Wharf, Karachi Port.

A technician from the Karachi medical examiner’s office estimated that he had been dead for 48 to 72 hours, enough time for the warm, humid conditions prevailing at the edge of the Arabian Sea to start their nasty work.

“From his ID papers, we know this man is an Uzbek named Uktam Hakim, a taxi driver with a license for the Tashkent region,” the police lieutenant told Brigadier Mahmood.

“He’s a bit far from home,” Mahmood said.

“With respect, not really sir,” the lieutenant said. “There is always a steady stream of drivers in their
jingle-jangle
trucks from central Asia arriving in Karachi with cargo, and then leaving again with a haul back to the Asian interior. I am surmising that he was an Uzbek lorry driver with some business at this warehouse.”

“Do you have a local address for Uktam Hakim?”

“We do not,” said the lieutenant. “Just an address in Tashkent.”

“We know Tashkent was the likely drop-off from Moscow,” Kate added.

"Even so, why would these chaps leave a body in the warehouse of the shipper they were using to transport a bomb? Surely that would call attention to the very thing they wanted to conceal. Why not dump the body in the ocean?"

“Let’s talk to someone at the shipping company headquarters downtown,” Kate suggested. “That’s where they would keep their records anyway. If one of the containers on our list passed through this warehouse, that’s a start that suggests we need to look into this.”

They drove a mile or two from the port to the head office of Global-Modal Asia, which was in a shiny new glass skyscraper on the Mumtaz Hassan Road in the heart of the Karachi financial district, next to the stock exchange. Brigadier Mahmood noticed that the Sindh Police Headquarters was conveniently next door.

Jaffar Sikandar was the managing director of the Karachi office of Global-Modal Asia Limited, and when he learned that an ISI brigadier general was in his waiting room he immediately came out to greet him. He was a well-groomed businessman in a dark gray pinstripe suit. He would have looked at home in any boardroom in the world.

“Please call me Jeff,” he said when introduced to Kate. He spoke idiomatically perfect American English, probably from a stint in the U.S. as an MBA candidate, she guessed. He recognized Brigadier Mahmood and shook hands with him.

“This must be about the unfortunate incident at the wharf,” Sikandar said.

“Indirectly,” Mahmood said. “We’re looking for an intermodal container that may have passed through your hands as it left Karachi port.”

“I was contacted two days ago by metropolitan police about a radiation alert, is that what you’re referring to?”

“The two incidents, the radiation alert and now this murder, they may be connected,” Kate said.

Sikandar opened a file folder that had been lying in the center of his desk, as though Sikandar had been studying it before they arrived. He pulled out a manifest.