“Maybe it’ll stay in Tehran for a month, or maybe in Paris or London or Marseilles or Tripoli, and then when our security measures start to loosen up, which they will, it’ll be moved again. Leapfrogged here.”
“Does he have a timetable?”
“That’s a possibility we’re going to have to consider. Could be he’s going to hit us on the Fourth of July, or maybe Labor Day; maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas.” McGarvey shook his head again. “Do you want to try for Lincoln’s birthday?”
Murphy sighed deeply. “If we had held back on the missile attack we could have avoided all of this.”
“Maybe,” McGarvey said. “He might have been stalling for time after all. Kept us talking while he moved the bomb into place.”
Murphy gave McGarvey a sharp look. “But you don’t believe that.” “Doesn’t matter. We have a situation in front of us now, and we have to deal with it. Nothing else is important.” The recriminations and finger-pointing would come later, McGarvey thought. Right now it was a question of motivation, dedication. “How are you feeling, Roland?”
Murphy smiled wanly. “That’s supposed to be my question to you.”
“I’ve felt worse. But when this is over I’m going to take a long vacation. Someplace without a mountain view.”
“Next time send someone else out into the field, okay? I want my DDO running the show, not becoming the star attraction.”
“No one likes the thought of getting old,” McGarvey said.
“No,” Murphy agreed. When McGarvey was gone a snatch of something started running around in the back of his head. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the line had something to do with dancing on a grave. It was disturbing, all the more so because his memory was imperfect, and because he wondered if it was a portent.
McGarvey entered the CIA’s main auditorium at 11:00 a.m. sharp and went directly to the podium on the small stage. A table was set next to it. He felt like hell, but he did not let it show. There were nearly a hundred people hastily assembled, all of them law enforcement or intelligence gathering officials, and most of them experts in counterterrorism. Adkins and his own staff took up the back rows, along with Tommy Doyle and some of his people from the Directorate of Intelligence. Rencke was held up downstairs with Jared Kraus in Technical Services, and Elizabeth was with him.
“Thank you for coming out on such short notice this morning. My name is Kirk McGarvey and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m the deputy director of Operations. I’ve called this meeting because the CIA believes that the United States is facing the worst threat of terrorism in its history. And we’re going to have to work together to try to stop it.” He dimmed the lights and clicked on the projection unit.
The slide showed the engineering diagram of the Russian nuclear bomb. “This information comes to us from Department of Defense and Department of Energy files,” McGarvey said. “The device on the screen is a Russian nuclear demolitions weapon which they call atvartka, or screwdriver. It has a nominal yield of one kiloton, it fits into a package about the size of a large suitcase, and detonation-ready it weighs between eighty and ninety pounds.
“It does not leak radiation, so Geiger counters cannot detect it and our conventional NEST forces will not work. Its conventional explosives are so well sealed that bomb sniffing dogs are of no use. It’s shockproof, heat proof waterproof and so extremely simple to operate that it does not require a trained technician to fire it. In short, ladies and gentlemen, the perfect terrorist’s weapon.”
McGarvey had their attention. He switched to the next slide, which showed a photograph of the actual device with a serial number next to it. “The nuclear weapon with this serial number was stored, until recently, at the Yavan Depot outside of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Because of the decaying political situation in many of the former Soviet Union’s breakaway republics, security for and accountability of such equipment is lax at the very best.”
He clicked to the next slide, showing two Russian officers. “Colonel Vladislav Drankov and Captain Vadim Perminov, who were in charge of security at the depot, were found guilty of dereliction of duty and theft by a military court. They were executed yesterday.”
The next slide came up. It showed a map of the region between Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan. Several routes through the mountains were marked in red. “We believe that these two Russian officers sold the nuclear weapon for thirty million U.S. dollars in cash to Osama bin Laden, who brought it by horseback through rebel-held territory to his base outside of Charikar as early as three months ago.”
“How the hell long has the CIA known about this?” the FBI’s Fred Rudolph demanded. He and McGarvey had worked together before. They had a great deal of respect for each other. But now Rudolph was mad. And he was clearly shook up, everyone in the audience was.
“About eight weeks, Fred,” McGarvey replied. “But we were not sitting on our hands. We had an operation in progress.”
“Evidently it wasn’t a success, or you wouldn’t have called us here,” Rudolph said. “The missile raid was an exercise in futility. Are you going to tell us that bin Laden survived?”
“It’s worse than that,” McGarvey said. He brought up the next image on the screen which showed the satellite shot of bin Laden carrying his daughter’s body. “This was taken from one of our Keyhole satellites within minutes after the missile attack on bin Laden’s mountain camp was completed. The figure at the lower left of the photograph is Osama bin Laden. As you can see, he survived. Subsequent photographs show that he was apparently not hurt.”
McGarvey looked up at the screen. “He’s carrying someone who did not survive the attack, however.”
He clicked to the next picture, this one the file photograph of Sarah. “This is Osama bin Laden’s nineteen- year old daughter, Sarah. It is her body he is carrying. It was she, along with at least eighteen of his mujahedeen, who was killed in the attack.”
“Oh, shit,” someone in the audience said.
“As you may expect, bin Laden is now well motivated” and he will attempt to bring the nuclear weapon into the United States sometime in the very near future — although we don’t know when — to hit a target that will inflict the maximum damage on us in retaliation for the death of his child. It’s up to us to stop him.”
“This is what the President meant in his speech,” Rudolph said softly, but McGarvey heard him. “It would have been helpful to our investigation if we had known all the facts.”
“National security concerns—” McGarvey said.
“Come on, Mac, we can’t do this in the dark,” Rudolph pressed. He was stunned, he was angry and he was frightened. They all were. “If we had known the score before Alien Trumble and his family were gunned down we might have been able to do something to prevent it. To prevent all of this. And then afterwards we were kept in the dark again about the raid. Why?”
“It was to protect my life,” McGarvey said. He paused a moment to let that sink in. “We thought that Alien Trumble and his family were killed by a faction who did not agree with bin Laden. Someone who wanted to use the bomb against us, even though bin Laden himself was apparently getting cold feet and wanted to talk to us.”
“Are you saying that you went over there and met with him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then why the missile attack?” Rudolph asked.
“It was a mistake.”
The auditorium was suddenly very quiet. McGarvey could see that they were evaluating the situation through the various perspectives of their own positions and experience. It was exactly what he wanted them to do. They were all coming more or less to the same conclusions: Either someone had made a colossal blunder bordering on the criminal, or McGarvey was lying to them to protect his own job. There wasn’t a person in the group who believed the latter.
“It’s on the way here,” Rudolph said.
“We’re going to have to assume that it is,” McGarvey said. “All of you have extensive files on bin Laden so I’m not going over his background except that before you leave you’ll each be given a diskette containing the CIA’s entire file. Nothing will be held back. We can’t afford the luxury. But I will tell you something that you most likely don’t know, and that’s not yet in the files. Bin Laden is probably dying of cancer and very possibly he doesn’t have much time left. It’s one of the reasons he agreed to meet with me, and now it’s all the more reason for him to hurry this last attack.”
“Maybe he’ll make a mistake,” someone said.
