McGarvey tired easily, though he was getting better. His staff was putting together the mission parameters, and Dick Adkins would make sure that they stayed on track. McGarvey had his own agenda to work on this afternoon, and at the moment he didn’t want any interference.
Killing bin Laden and getting away safely would be difficult but not impossible if the plans stayed dead simple. Put a committee on it and the first thing that would come up was proof that the mission could not succeed. One man could not do it on his own. The job would take a small army. But the logistics for such a strike would be impossible to keep simple. Look what had happened when Jimmy Carter tried to mount a rescue operation in Tehran. The project should be scrubbed.
And maybe we were already too late, Adkins had suggested after the staff meeting. Killing or arresting bin Laden could very well be a moot point if the bomb were to be detonated in the middle of the planning stage. Then you’d better make it quick, McGarvey had shot back sharply. Adkins was used to him by now, but McGarvey had seen that his remark had been over the top. It was too bad, but they had work to do to avert a disaster. He would apologize later.
Bin Laden was holed up in Khartoum, the troubled and complicated capital of a troubled and complicated country torn apart by almost continuous fighting. Its oil reserves were thought to be as vast as Saudi Arabia’s. Religious factions were fighting each other. And the Iranian military was in Sudan in a very big way because of the strategic importance of the country. It had leases on military bases in Port Sudan and Suakin that ran until 2019, thousands of Iranian soldiers were in training on Sudanese soil and there was a powerful Iranian-funded radio station in Port Sudan that beamed Islamic propaganda to the entire region.
But the CIA also had a hand in Sudanese politics, something that McGarvey had only come to realize after he’d become deputy director of Operations. He was trying to extricate the Company from the morass, but it had become a Dennis Berndt pet project, and getting out was impossible for the moment. Money and arms were being funneled to the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army of Christian Nilotes. They weren’t doing much to change the nature of the politics over there, but they were a source of potential embarrassment to the U.S. It was something he’d tried to explain to the White House, but his arguments fell on deaf ears. Leave politics to the politicians, he’d been told.
There were any number of the SPLA’s soldiers who could be persuaded to try for a hit on bin Laden. McGarvey had seriously considered the possibility. But there wasn’t one chance in a million that any of them would be successful, let alone survive the attempt. They were farmers turned amateur soldiers. They did not have the discipline, the equipment, the training or the dedication to carry out such an operation. They might be able to supply the shooter with a relatively safe haven after the kill, and possibly the means of getting him out of the country, but nothing else.
A detailed street map of downtown Khartoum was displayed on his computer monitor. The map was keyed to the National Reconnaissance Office’s digital file of satellite photographs. He clicked on the vertical borders and brought them inward until they encompassed the block in which bin Laden’s compound was located. He did the same with the horizontal borders, then clicked on the photo reconnaissance record. A menu came up showing more than a hundred shots, some of them infrared, of the area within the box, each marked with a date and time. He pulled up a series that had been taken over a five-day period starting two months ago, just after the missile raid.
It was too much to hope that one of the satellites might have caught bin Laden himself showing up, but he was looking for the same kinds of patterns he’d asked Rencke to look for. Was the traffic to the compound mostly from the outside, or were bin Laden or his people traveling out of the compound to attend meetings elsewhere in the city, or the region?
A big problem was that bin Laden had an inside track on the satellites’ orbits. It could be someone on the inside of the NRO, or possibly even computer hackers who’d gotten into the system, found out what they wanted to know and then got back out, all without being detected by one of the new anti hacker programs. Rencke thought that was a slim possibility at best. Actually figuring out what satellite would be “overhead at any given time was fairly simple for someone who knew some mathematics and some rudimentary orbital mechanics. If you plotted a satellite’s movements across the sky at night when it could be seen, a mathematician could predict where it would be at any given time. Thus whenever a photo recon satellite was overhead there seemed to be a sharp drop in traffic in the area around the compound.
Finding nothing in the first series of photographs, McGarvey narrowed the horizontal and vertical borders to box in nothing but bin Laden’s compound. As before a menu came up showing a series of photographs that were taken in the past seven years since the compound was first identified as a possible bin Laden stronghold. The number of photographs was well over one thousand, practically speaking, a dead end for him, McGarvey thought.
Rencke came from Adkins’s office unannounced. “You’re not going to get anywhere like that.”
McGarvey looked up, vexed that he was being interrupted. “Try knocking next time.”
“I only meant that I’ve been over all those pictures. You already know what I came up with.” It suddenly dawned on Rencke what McGarvey was really up to and his eyes widened. “Oh, wow, Mac, you can’t be serious. Not after what you already went through.”
“It has to be done.”
“If you say so,” Rencke said. He started hopping from one foot to the other. “But use somebody else.”
“There isn’t anybody.”
“You mean that there’s nobody you’d be willing to send on such a mission,” Rencke countered.
McGarvey shook his head. “You might be beating a dead horse no matter what we do,” he said. “Unless he comes out of his compound, or unless we can lure him out of it, he’s going to stay pretty safe for the duration.”
“That’s about what I came up with, ya know. And it’s different this time, not like the others.”
He had McGarvey’s attention. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t have my search engines so it’d take you a long time to figure out what’s happening. The last three times that bin Laden was in residence he didn’t stay put. He traveled all over the place. He even flew over to London once. Tehran, Beirut, Tripoli, everywhere.”
McGarvey turned to stare at his computer screen.
“He’s hunkered down,” Rencke said. “It means that he doesn’t want to take any risks.”
“Either that or he’s too sick to travel now.”
“In that case guys like Turabi and General al-Bashir wouldn’t be showing up on his doorstep on such a regular basis.” Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir was the president of Sudan and the leader of the National Salvation Revolutionary Council. “That’s what I came to tell you. He’s staying put for a reason. And the heavy hitters are coming to see him for the same reason.”
“He’s waiting for the bomb to go off, and they’re trying to talk him out of it.”
“Bingo,” Rencke said without his usual enthusiasm. “It’s just like you figured.” “Find the bomb, find Bahmad and keep the President and his family out of harm’s way. We have the best people in the country working on it, but so far we’ve struck out.” McGarvey looked up. “All we can do is keep trying. Starting this weekend in San Francisco.”
“Don’t forget Liz,” Rencke said with feeling. “They tried to hurt her once, they might try again.”
rio de Arriba, Mexico
At ten thousand feet the Baja California coast was little more than a hazy, pale brown slash against the deep, electric blue of the Pacific Ocean, but as they came in for a landing Bahmad could see the Rosario Marina where he would pick up his ride. It was very large and modern, but there were only a few boats tied up at the more than five hundred slips. The parking lot behind the restaurantcondominium complex was nearly empty too. A lot of the boats had to be out of fishing charters now, and the handful left were powerboats, all of them large and expensive.
“We’ve gotten some of the heavy hitters to sign up, but the flood hasn’t started yet,” the Gulfstream pilot Wayne Hansen observed. “The word’ll get out.” Bahmad sat in the copilot’s seat because he thought it might be possible to catch a glimpse of the Margo on the horizon. But they never flew that far off shore, and he did not direct the pilot to do so. He wanted to keep the need to know at an absolute minimum.
“Is this place new?” he asked.
