The Polaris Protocol (22 page)

T
he town was small, as American towns go. A square patch outlined by parallel streets and no buildings with more than two stories. Main Street was a throwback to quieter times, with bunting in the windows and every store a stand-alone family affair, sporting names like Cowboy Collectibles and the Blue Pine Motel.

Surrounded on all sides by great swaths of national forest, Panguitch, Utah, was like an island of Americana that someone forgot to tell to grow with the times. A town where everyone still waved when they drove by, whether they knew you or not, and the chosen vehicle was a pickup, preferably a four-by-four dually.

My kind of place, although the damn hybrid rental I was driving wasn’t helping my reputation any.

I was a little shocked that the Oversight Council had given me the go-ahead for my plan. Okay, a lot shocked. They were usually a bunch of handwringers, and I would have thought a request to recruit a terrorist I’d previously captured would be dead on arrival, but they’d said yes.

I’d flown into the closest airport, located in Cedar City, and driven about an hour, looping around the national forests on Interstate 15 and other back roads. Pulling into town, I’d checked into a roadside hotel and then set out to meet the county sheriff.

I’d never been to any of our Cloud locations before and was a little interested in how they worked. When we developed the Taskforce, we had one overarching problem: what to do with the guys we captured. Contrary to popular belief or what the news blabs, we don’t set out to kill everyone. Capture is a much, much better option because it allows us to extract more information that leads to further dismantling of the terrorist threat. Allows us to start painting a picture of the network.

Too often, the intelligence community hears a name or a reference to something and doesn’t know why it’s important. But the terrorists do, so if you can get a thorough debriefing, you can start building the connections, then wait for some bit of chatter to spike interest. You hear the name Abu Bagodonuts, and while you’d otherwise have thrown it away or stored it for future reference, now you
have
the reference, and you know that ol’ Bagodonuts is a passport forger or whatever, and you can start piecing together the puzzle of what they’re trying to do.

The problem was that we operated outside official channels, so we couldn’t very well march into a New York City courthouse and throw the terrorist on the floor, trussed up and whining, then fly out with a big S on our chests. So we’d come up with our own solution: the Cloud.

Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay would seem to have been the logical choice. I mean, according to the world press and jihadist propaganda, we capture and torture the shit out of terrorists there on a daily basis, without any oversight whatsoever, right? In reality, Gitmo is the most overwatched prison on earth, with a permanent international Red Cross office that has instant access to any and all detainees. Once you go there, you’re pretty much treated like a king—at least as far as prisoners go—with soccer fields, prayer rugs, cable TV, and the ability to bitch about the food and get on a worldwide stage. Make no mistake, once someone’s interned at Gitmo, there’s little information coming out. The only talking the terrorists do at the prison is screaming about imaginary abuses to CNN.

In the early days we could have used a CIA black site in a foreign country, but that went by the wayside with press revelations about “secret prisons” and the enormous backlash from the countries who had agreed to work with us because we promised we could keep a secret. Which we couldn’t.

We kicked around starting our own version, black site lite, as it were, but eventually decided that involving foreign governments was probably not the way to go, considering the Taskforce was illegal under our own laws. They’d want to know how we got the bad guys, which could expose the existence of the Taskforce and create a potential leak that we couldn’t control. So, no new black sites.

Someone finally came up with the idea of using the terrorists’ own techniques against them. While they were all separate entities and sometimes fought among themselves, Islamic radical groups were also interconnected and used those connections to further their goals. Know a guy you went to school with who now works in a bank? Get him to transfer some funds off the books. Have a buddy you met at a training camp from a country you want to enter? Get him to coordinate travel. It worked out very well for them, and it turned out we could do the same thing.

There are a plethora of special operations folks who have served and are now in the private sector, working in a host of legitimate roles, from schoolteacher to insurance salesman. Having risen to the cream of the crop, they all still held a deep patriotic bent and would help if asked, and so we did.

We reached out to a very select few who were now working in law enforcement. The idea was to hide the captured terrorists in plain sight, at a jail in the United States that was run by someone who held a security clearance and had worked in special operations. Someone who could stash the guy, allow interrogations, and ensure his health and welfare was taken care of while keeping it all under the good-ol’-boy hat.

And the Cloud was born.

The name was a play on cloud computing, whereby we’d remove the terrorist and his “data” from the real world and “store” them in a special place that nobody on the outside could see or touch, locked away from other prying eyes, accessible only by authorized members of the Taskforce. One of those locations was here.

The Garfield County sheriff’s office was a few miles out of town, on a road that ran along the Panguitch creek. On the same property was the county jail, used pretty much exclusively for household domestic violence calls, drunk drivers, or, more dangerously, marijuana growers, who were staking their claim more and more to the surrounding national forest lands, playing cat and mouse with the Forest Service response teams.

The sheriff’s name was Bob Marley, something I’m sure he hated now that the marijuana growers had started to move in. He had some history with special operations and had agreed to use his jail as a Cloud location, one of many sprinkled throughout the small towns of America. He was responsible for the man I wanted to see, but first I had to prove who I was.

I pulled my hamster-powered hybrid in front of a corner coffee shop that looked straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, parking between a Jeep and a Ford F-250 pickup. I shut the door, getting some stares from two old guys sitting on a park bench out front. One said, “How well does that thing work when it snows?”

I passed by them and said, “Not so good, but the hamsters under the hood are trained to dig.”

I entered the café without waiting on a response and glanced around. There was another pair of old guys sitting at the counter drinking coffee, a man and woman in a booth to my right, and in the back, a solo man with a laptop in front of him, facing the door. He was dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans, and a cowboy hat. I was expecting someone in uniform, making identification easy, but there was nobody here like that.

I walked up to the guy in back and he stood. I said, “Sheriff Marley?”

“Yep.” He shook my hand and motioned to the opposite seat in the booth. After the waitress had come and gone, he said, “How can I help you?”

Feeling like I was in a
Mission: Impossible
movie, I slid across a thumb drive. He plugged it into the laptop, did some fiddling around on the keyboard, and waited, giving me a smile.

I
couldn’t see his screen but knew the thumb drive was conducting a sync with the laptop, each interrogating the other to make sure the ciphers matched. After a second, he leaned in and said, “Alpha Echo Seven Seven Seven.”

I pulled out my phone and tethered it via Bluetooth to his computer, the access codes automatically locking on because of the thumb drive. The screen showed AE777 on one line and ZG502 on another. I said, “Zulu Golf Five Zero Two.”

He smiled again and closed the laptop. “You don’t look like an intel weenie.”

I said, “Neither do you.”

He laughed and said, “I’m just a small-town sheriff. You Army?”

“Yeah. Well, I was. Doing something different now. Like you.”

“Something different, but nothing like me, I suspect. I was One Seven-Five, back in the day when I was a barrel-chested freedom fighter.”

And I knew I was in like a tick on a hound dog, to use a phrase that seemed to fit in around here. One Seven-Five was First Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Infantry. A Ranger, like me.

I said, “No shit. I spent some time in Third Batt. Not as nice as Savannah, but I guess you didn’t see much of that city while you were there anyway.”

As expected, he immediately felt a bond, and I saw him relax. We of course spent the next few minutes playing the “You know Sergeant Humpty-Hump?” game, figuring out where we’d crossed paths. He didn’t ask outright for everywhere I’d served, but he was smart. He peppered the name list with men who’d moved on to a different, more select unit. A special-mission unit I was also once in. It didn’t take him long to confirm I wasn’t an intelligence analyst.

Eventually we ran out of war stories, and he said, “What’s an Operator doing here? I’ve had this guy for over a year, and the only people who’ve shown up might as well have been driving a hybrid car and wearing a lab coat.”

I skipped telling him about my rental. “I’m not here to get information out of him. I might be moving him to another location, depending on what he says.”

He nodded, not asking any more questions, knowing it wasn’t his place to do so. He’d only been read on to his specific activities with the Cloud and had no knowledge at all of the Taskforce, but he was smart enough to be able to guess.

I said, “How many other guys in the Cloud do you have here? Will they know he’s gone?”

“None. He’s my first, and from what I know, they never put two in the same place.”

Good thinking.
It was weird getting a glimpse into part of the Taskforce that had been kept secret from me. Especially since I’d helped create the organization and was one of the Operators who fed the detainees into this system.

I said, “Can you give me some background on him before I go in? What’s he like? How’s he act?”

“He’s not bad at all. Actually, he’s pretty polite. Never gives us any trouble. His only request has been books. He reads constantly. Nothing like the drunks we usually deal with.”

That gave me a little alarm. The terrorist was a Palestinian assassin from a refugee camp in Lebanon. He went by the name the Ghost, and he was very cunning. He’d come close to killing some of my team in Dubai using an ingenious heat-detonated improvised explosive device he’d created in about ten minutes using parts from a hardware store. He was a killer who had never registered on our radar, which meant he’d been very, very good. We weren’t even sure if we had his actual name, since we’d found five attached to him. If he’d been here a year, he’d probably come up with some idea of how to escape.

“You realize his danger, though, right? This guy tried to kill the sheik of Dubai and the American envoy to the Middle East with an explosive device that cut the cables to an elevator. He is
smart
. I don’t care how polite he is, treat him like Hannibal Lecter.”

Bob held up his hands. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he’s not flinging shit through the bars or going on a hunger strike like I read about at Gitmo, but I treat him with the respect he deserves. Don’t worry, when I was read on to the Cloud I was given my left and right limits. I’m out of the Army, but I still have some discipline.” He took a sip of coffee and said, “Although when you see him, you might second-guess whether we have the right man. He’s a scrawny little guy with Coke-bottle glasses that make him look like the kid who got bullied at school. Doesn’t look like a master terrorist. But then again, neither did the ones I took out in Iraq. Don’t worry, I get it.”

I didn’t want to let on that I was the one who’d captured him, because as far as the sheriff knew, he might have been taken off a flight by the TSA. It didn’t sound like the Ghost had changed much, though. Although I guess he wasn’t getting any time to hit the gym.

“Has he talked about Islam or thrown any propaganda at you when you dealt with him? Killing infidels or anything like that?”

Whether I continued would hinge on his answer. The Ghost was a killer, but he wasn’t what I would call a radical jihadi. At the end of the day, he was a Palestinian nationalist who happened to be Muslim. He had no interest in a global caliphate or taking the war to the capitalist kafirs. His interest was the injustice he perceived had been committed against the Palestinian people. At least that was my take, and after reading the file of his extensive interviews, I knew it was also the take of the intelligence analysts. He, naturally, hated Israel and all it stood for, along with the United States for supporting that country, but he’d been screwed by Hezbollah as well, and I hoped to use that.

I wanted a second opinion, though. The Ghost might have fed the analysts whatever he thought would help him out, then dropped his guard around the prison personnel, letting something slip out about his true mental state.

Bob said, “No. Not really. Honestly, I haven’t even seen him pray like the devout ones do. When he looks at you, you can tell he’d probably like to put a knife to your throat, but I don’t think it’s because of Islam. I’d be giving him the same looks if I were locked up in a secret prison. Like I said, he’s pretty polite otherwise.”

“Have you talked to him extensively? Engaged him in conversation while he’s been here?”

“No. Not allowed to, beyond the normal day-to-day activities. The only ones allowed to engage him are guys like you who come in with a thumb drive.”

Should have expected that.

“Look,” Bob said, “I’ve only got a two-hour window when I can get you in and out without anyone else seeing. I don’t think I’m going to be able to give you anything more than those analysts.”

I nodded and stood, throwing enough money on the table to cover both of our coffee orders. “Let’s go.”