Tier One Wild (26 page)

Now we are getting somewhere,
thought Dalwan. He had no idea what the Quds Force men were doing in Cairo, and he did not care, unless it got in the way of one of his VEVAK ops. But if a group of American spies in town under nonofficial cover suddenly needed a Farsi translator for 24/7 on-site work … well, this sounded like a surveillance operation, and it sounded to Dalwan like his Quds colleagues were burned.

This was definitely worth passing on to the Republican Guard to inform their Quds agents. It might even earn Dalwan some kudos with his nation’s military.

“This man that they are hiring, what can you tell me about him?”

“He is Egyptian, but he lived in Iran in the seventies. He is a university professor here in Cairo, and he has the required security clearances for intelligence work with Americans.”

“And you have his home address?”

El Nasr said, “I do. He called me personally about the advance. I told him I will look into it for him, and I am meeting him for lunch. From the conversation we had I assume he will be going to his contract job after this.”

“Excellent, my friend. You have done well by bringing this to my attention.”

“Would it be imprudent for me to ask how I will be rewarded?”

“Not at all, I think you deserve double the usual rate for your product.”

Majid Dalwan smiled.

*   *   *

At the AQAP village near Wadi Bana, Charles wiped sweat from his forehead and looked into his rearview mirror.

“Charles” was a Saudi whose real name was Mustafa. He sat in the front seat of a Toyota pickup truck, his hands on the steering wheel. Next to him was “Nick,” a Pakistani named Nawaz. They sat silently, parked under an awning of one of the barracks.

David Doyle walked up to the driver’s-side window and knocked on it with a radio.

Charles rolled down the window and looked to the leader of the cell.

“Afternoon,” said Doyle.

“Hello, Officer.”

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

“I am sorry. I do not know.”

“You were doing forty-eight in a thirty-five.”

“I am sorry.” Charles started to reach into his back pocket for his driver’s license.

“Don’t you fucking move!” David screamed, and he pulled a pistol from the holster on his belt. “Show me your hands, motherfucker!”

Charles raised his hands quickly. “I am sorry! I am sorry.”

David pointed the loaded gun across Charles and at the chest of Nick now. “You, too, you piece of shit. Hands up!”

Doyle then pulled both men out of the car and frisked them with their hands on the hood of the Toyota. As he did this the rest of the group stood around inside the building and watched the action under the awning through large open windows.

When the frisking was finished, when Charles and Nick were allowed back in their vehicle and told to drive on, David ended the exercise. He turned to the group watching through the windows and said, “My brothers. Through it all you must remember to smile. People
smile
in America. It means nothing. They will still do you harm, but if you are not smiling at them all the time, then they will not trust you.”

It went on like this for hours until, finally, every member of the force could obey all the commands and answer all the questions of a normal traffic stop by American law enforcement.

After this protracted lesson of the day, David and his four subunit members joined him at the container for more practice getting down to the ground and ready to fire. He’d gotten their time down to thirty-nine seconds, more or less consistently, but he pushed his men even harder.

They would only have a few more days before it was time to begin their journey to America, and he needed them ready.

*   *   *

Iranian intelligence officer Majid Dalwan contacted his counterparts in the Republican Guard, and by noon the Quds security men at the Sofitel knew a potential compromise of their operation had occurred. They were waiting outside the restaurant where Dalwan lunched with the interpreter, and then followed him in three vehicles at a distance. With two men in a car, and two more men on two motorcycles, they followed him out of Garden City and then south.

The interpreter parked his car in the garage at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and the surveillance team fanned out, expecting him to go inside.

But as soon as he climbed out of his vehicle, a black Range Rover pulled out of a nearby space and rolled up next to him. The Iranian professor climbed into the SUV and they headed out of the parking garage while the Quds officers scrambled to reorganize their mobile coverage.

The Range Rover headed south, and the Iranians backed off farther now, monitoring for any countersurveillance put up by the opposition. They called in two more motorcycles, bringing to five the number of vehicles tailing the interpreter now.

Within minutes they felt confident they were tailing a vehicle operated by intelligence operatives. The black SUV turned down side streets, raced through intersections as the lights changed, and changed lanes over and over, searching for a tail.

But the Quds men had been doing this sort of work for a long time, and they managed to keep one vehicle in sight of their target through all the countermeasures.

After three in the afternoon the SUV rolled into the gates of a small fenced office building in eastern Maadi. The single biker with visual on the Range Rover rolled on by while the other vehicles backed off.

Fifteen minutes later two Quds officers walked through the unfinished construction of a high-rise apartment building across the street from the safe house. They took stairs to the fourth floor, and then stood back in the shadows, looking over the building in front of them. Several cars were lined up behind the fence next to a single door to the lobby. There were neither signs nor security out front.

One of the Quds men settled down in the construction with a pair of binoculars and a mobile phone, while the other returned to the Sofitel.

By midafternoon the Iranians had established that a team of American operatives, likely not local CIA spies from their embassy, were operating a safe house in Cairo and working an operation that required Farsi translation.

They’d have to contact Iran for further instructions, and they would warn the Aref Saleh Organization that there had, almost certainly, been a serious compromise of the operation.

*   *   *

Aref Saleh slipped his satellite phone back onto its charging cradle and leaned back in his chair. It was perfectly quiet in his simple but functional office on the third floor of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd., on Kornish al Nile.

He strummed his fingers slowly on the blotter in front of him, thinking about the distressing call he had just received. Saleh was a good businessman, and he knew better than to argue with a customer, but he had just spent twenty minutes arguing with the leader of the Iranian contingent here in town to meet with him.

The man had admonished Saleh and his organization, claiming that the Quds Force operatives had been compromised here in the city due to the poor security measures put in place by the JSO. When Aref questioned him on this further, the Iranian explained that they had tracked a Farsi speaker to a CIA safe house in Saleh’s neighborhood.

The fifty-eight-year-old Libyan had snapped back that these were tenuous grounds on which to place blame. If American intelligence was here in the city monitoring the Iranians, then, as far as Saleh was concerned, that was the Iranians’ fault, and that was the Iranians’ problem.

Saleh did not think there was a chance his operation had been discovered. He had paid agents in the Egyptian police, military, and government, just as he had in Libya, who would warn him if an operation against him were in place. Even if American intelligence were somehow onto his scent, Saleh did not think they would be operating without some level of participation by their allies in the Egyptian government. And
his
Egyptian government allies, Saleh had no doubt in his mind, would pass word on to him.

No, the Iranian fools had made a mistake, they had brought American agents along with them to the city,
they
were the ones under surveillance.

Not him.

An initial sale of Igla-S shoulder-fired missiles had been made to the Quds Force operatives weeks earlier; the man who had come from Tehran with six security officers for his protection was here to negotiate a second purchase of the goods. The meeting had been timed to coincide with the delivery of the first shipment so that these men would be here in town to assure that nothing went wrong.

Well, something had gone wrong. Saleh snorted as he thought of this.
Shiite thugs.
They were here to make a second purchase, yes, but also to intimidate him with their presence.

And
they
brought American spies.

Saleh did not know what they would do about this threat from America, but he told the Iranians, in no uncertain terms, that they needed to stay away from him. He did not need the Americans learning about him or his operation.

Late this afternoon the Igla-S weapons would arrive from the Libyan desert, and then late tonight they would ship out, following the orders of the Iranians.

Once this was done, Saleh decided, he would leave Cairo for a while. Maybe permanently. He would leave his shipping concern here to handle the goods physically, but he would relocate his offices for his own personal security. Not back to Tripoli, no. Perhaps to Beirut. Yes. He could pay off members of Hezbollah, and he would work from there.

Beirut was lovely in the fall and, unlike Cairo, it was free of American spies.

TWENTY-THREE

Kolt Raynor and his team had spent the majority of the day conducting mobile surveillance around the Sofitel in preparation for the arrival of the technical surveillance team from Langley the following morning. They returned to the safe house at 1630, eager for an hour’s rest before heading back to the hotel for an evening sitting in their vehicles watching to see if the Quds Force operatives ventured out.

Kolt first popped his head in the comms room to let Curtis know they were back, then he headed into the kitchen for a bottle of water. As he did so he almost bumped into a thin man in his sixties who was opening the refrigerator door to peek inside.

“Good afternoon,” the man said in accented English.

Kolt just looked at the man, then turned away and headed back into the hallway without returning the greeting. He stuck his head back into the comms room. “Curtis. A word, please.”

The two men stepped out of the travel agency and headed down the stairs into the empty lobby of the building. Once there, Kolt turned on the CIA man quickly. “Who the
fuck
is that?”

“Jesus. Calm down, dude. He’s the terp.”

“What the hell is he doing here?”

“He’s fully vetted by Cairo Station.”

“He’s local?”

“That’s right. He’s the best guy in town with clearance.”

“I told you to stay away from Cairo Station on this.”

Curtis stood his ground. “But I don’t work for you, Major! Look, I know better than to farm this off to some untested Persian egghead who translates pamphlets for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or some shit. This guy is a vetted agent. He’s worked with us since the late eighties.”

“That’s great,” said Kolt. “But you pull a guy into an NOC safe house who is getting paid by the local station, and it can create a paper trail or raise questions around the embassy. I’ve seen it happen.”

Curtis started pacing the empty lobby. “You’ve seen it all, haven’t you, Rambo? Well, let me remind you, it’s my op. I know what I’m doing.”

“I don’t give a shit whose op it is, Curtis. I am responsible for my people and I sure as shit will not put them in danger because of some bureaucratic fuckup.”

“What do you want me to do? He knows where the safe house is. It won’t do any good to send him home now.” Curtis clapped his hands together. “I’ve got it! Let’s shoot him. Will that work for you? You’ve been here, what, five days, and you haven’t killed anybody? Let’s go fix that right now. We just pop a cap in that motherfucker and call it a day.”

At that moment Kolt wanted to shoot Myron Curtis. But instead he said, “The terp can stay. PERSEC at this place is your problem. This place is getting too crowded. Me and my team are outta here.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Racer.”

“I’m serious. We’ll find another locale and head out.”

*   *   *

Kolt moved his team to a second safe house in under an hour. It was close to the Nile but five klicks south of Curtis’s location. It was also near Cairo’s metro’s north-south line, which could be convenient, as well.

These digs weren’t nearly as nice as the travel agency location, but they seemed a hell of a lot more secure. A simple house in a neighborhood with other white people walking around amid the local Arab population, a wall, a gate, a two-car garage, and several large, empty, dusty rooms.

Sleeping bags had been tossed in one of the bedrooms, but Kolt and Cindy opted for a ten-by-ten room with local-style twin beds. There was also a big living room with rugs on the floor, a kitchen stocked with canned food and dried food and a frightening array of molded, rotten, and otherwise nasty items in the refrigerator.

These safe houses were set up and maintained by the local CIA station. Cairo had been a hotbed of CIA activity since the revolution over a year earlier and Raynor decided it was no great surprise that personnel at CIA Station Cairo had been stretched pretty thin of late.

It didn’t look like anyone had been in to check on this safe house in half a year.

But Kolt had his team in place, and he was satisfied that their position was secure. He and Slapshot had just established satellite comms with JSOC back at Fort Bragg when Kolt’s mobile phone vibrated in his pocket.

He looked down and saw that it was Myron Curtis.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Curtis.”

“What?” Kolt was not going to engage the man in small talk.

“Thirty-five minutes ago a tractor-trailer rolled through the gates of Maadi Land and Sea.”