Over the years the unit had been known by a variety of names: Foreign Operating Group, Intelligence Support Activity, Centra Spike, Gray Fox, and quite a few others. The frequent name changes were part of JSOC's ongoing efforts to persuade government bean counters that the elite unit was being reformed following inquiries into the latest assassination or other covert op du jour. An ambassador would protest that he hadn't been briefed, someone from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the Armed Services Committee would ask what the hell was going on, the Pentagon would tell JSOC it had better behave, JSOC would say sorry and give the unit a new name. Egos would be massaged, faces saved, consciences salved. But the program itself never really changed. Because the truth was, the more restrictions Congress and the brass laid down on “white” special ops units like the Green Berets, the greater the need for “black” units like Ben's. It was a demand-side problem, and thank God there were men who would always find a way to create a supply.
Ben briefed Hort about the way it went down in Istanbul, using a pay phone and a portable scrambler that fit over the mouthpiece of the receiver. He told him about the Russian.
“You sure he was Russian?” Hort asked in his gravelly baritone and cultured coastal drawl.
“Pretty sure,” Ben said. “He had the Slavic cheekbones and pale skin, and that flat expression, if you know what I mean. Plus he was standing there like he was untouchable.”
“Right up until you touched him.”
“He was going for a weapon.”
“Don't worry, son, I believe you. No chance he was Israeli? They would have loved to take a crack at the two you sent to Valhalla.”
Ben thought about that. He'd even wondered at one point whether someone had considered handing this op off to the Mossad. Probably someone had, but with their better intel inside Iran, the Israelis might have figured out who the mole was, and no one would have been willing to take that chance, even with one of America's closest allies in the dreaded global war on terror. Plus there was always someone at JSOC lobbying for use of U.S. resources. They'd invested an enormous amount training-in fact, creating-Ben and a few others like him, and what was the point of having an attack dog if you didn't sometimes let him off the leash?
“I'm thinking he was FSB,” Ben said. The FSB was the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB.
“I hope not,” Hort said. “Those guys are like the mafia. Hell, with all those former KGB siloviki in office, they are the mafia.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I'll see what I can find out. But don't worry, even if he was FSB, it's not going to be obvious who did it. The other two had a lot of enemies.”
The Iranian enemies Hort was referring to were the Israelis. In fact, while he was in Istanbul, Ben had been eating food brought directly from Israel. If the op went sideways and he was killed, or if he was captured and used the cyanide pill he was carrying, there would be an autopsy, his stomach contents analyzed. Best for things to point in the direction of Israel. JSOC had laid down a few other false clues, as well, nothing too heavy-handed. Not a very nice trick to play on a friend, but the Israelis were realists and would understand. Anyway, what could Russia really do to Israel that it wasn't doing already? Sell arms to Damascus? Deliver nuclear fuel to Tehran? And what could Iran do? Back Hezbollah? Blow up another Argentine synagogue? Yeah, one thing the Israelis had going for them was clarity. Their enemies couldn't hate them more than they already did. Ben wished the U.S. could be equally clear-eyed. What did Caligula say? Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.
He went back to waiting in his room. He didn't go out much. There were periods in his life where he would go days without even speaking, where his whole world would shrink to no more than the dimensions of the walls around him. Sometimes he withdrew so thoroughly, the only thing that would bring him out of it was the buzz of his pager.
He thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too. In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don't cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries from their birth stand astride the planet. The benevolent peace lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.
It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger but with Old Testament-style moral wrath. Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.
Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as long as they also feared it. Oderint dum metuant.
True, there were downsides to the fear. After the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein, every bush-league enemy of America out there realized he needed an insurance policy. Because if Saddam had had a few nukes and had demonstrated the insanity or even just the minimal resolve to use them if attacked-and who would bet against a guy who had gassed his own people?-the U.S. would have stood down for sure. The Iranians understood this. It was part of why they were trying so hard for a nuke of their own.
He smiled. Well, they'd suffered a bit of a setback recently, hadn't they?
But killing the scientists was mostly just buying time. America was the world's richest, most networked, most technologically advanced nation, with unparalleled military superiority. Nukes might be enough to check a power like that, but that didn't mean America's enemies weren't also looking for a checkmate. The Chinese were experimenting with antisatellite technology, looking for a way to put out America's eyes in space. For the Russians, it was all about cyberwarfare, with their massive denial-of-service attack on Estonia a trial run. The Iranians and other third-tier powers… who knew? In a thousand garages and bunkers and secret laboratories all around the world, motivated men probed for weakness. When they found it, they would exploit it.
Luckily, there were hundreds of guys in the bowels of the Pentagon whose job was to ruminate over all the possibilities, imagine, predict, monitor, counter. Of course, there had been people assigned to figure out how to protect America from asymmetrical threats pre-9/11, too. But there were more of them now, and they were better motivated. The Defense Department had even formalized some of it, turning the Eighth Air Force into something called a Cyber Command, tasked with training and equipping forces to conduct network defense, attack, and exploitation. Ben hoped they were doing their job.
Well, he was doing his. He was proud of that. If his folks were alive, maybe they would have been proud, too.
Maybe not, though. He'd always been the black sheep. There was a reserve about him, a stillness at his core his parents found vaguely discomfiting and other kids mistook as a kind of cool. The stillness had made him popular, and that unsought, effortless popularity, along with the friends and dates and parties that came with it, had acted to balance the stillness and to some extent conceal it.
His father had been an engineer with IBM, and the family had moved three times when Ben was a kid-first, Yorktown Heights in New York; then Austin, Texas; and then Portola Valley, in California's Silicon Valley, a stone's throw from the San Andreas Fault. Ben had a knack for football and wrestling, and sports were always a good way to quickly get accepted in a new school. His younger sister, Katie, never had a problem, either. She was a beautiful girl with a radiant smile and nothing but goodwill in her heart, who had it in her just to naturally like everyone, and naturally enough, everyone seemed to like her in return.
Alex, the youngest of the three, was the problem. He was shy and awkward everywhere but in the classroom, where the little teacher's pet would have an answer to every question and never made a mistake. Alex's constant need to show everyone how smart he was would invariably attract the attention of a bully, and then it would fall to Ben to straighten the bully out. The bully would typically have an older brother, and the brother would always have friends. Usually it took three or four fistfights before Ben established that even if his younger brother was a dipshit, that didn't mean people could pick on him. During these periods, when Ben had to make things clear to people, he often found himself suspended from school. His parents were appalled. They demanded explanations, but what could Ben really tell them? Alex, with his instant aptitude for science and school, was his father's favorite, and the old man wouldn't have understood that it was precisely Alex's showing off all the time in class that was causing the problems. A few times, after Ben had violently interceded on his behalf, Alex thanked
