States was their enemy, Muslim extremism would thrive. “The guerrillas are the fish, and the people are the water,” Mao had said. Drone attacks that killed civilians were fish food. So was support for repressive and undemocratic governments. The agency was doing a good job tactically. Strategically, not so much.
But then the agency didn’t set strategy, despite what the conspiracy theorists thought. The ultimate decision-maker lived five miles away on the other side of the Potomac. And whichever party he represented, he could never plan too far ahead. Not with elections every two years. So the strategy became: Stop the jihadis today, and let tomorrow take care of itself.
Though Shafer didn’t have too many tomorrows left, either. His mandatory retirement was fast approaching. The cliches were true, too. Time did fly. The days were long, but the years were short. Shafer still remembered the wonder he’d felt on his first morning as he drove onto the campus in his Oldsmobile, a brand now extinct.
More and more, Shafer found himself thinking of bonds made and broken. He and Jennifer Exley and Wells had known one another for fifteen years. Shafer would trust either of them with his life. And he knew the other two felt the same way, even if Wells was angry about what had happened on their last mission.
Yet the three of them had splintered. Wells and Exley had quit the agency. Wells had an uncontrollable thirst for action — a rage, really. Exley had left him because she was sure he would eventually get himself killed. And she was probably right. Wells was both lucky and good. But luck couldn’t last forever, and skills inevitably eroded. Yet Shafer couldn’t imagine reining in Wells. He belonged in the field like no one Shafer had ever met. After everything he’d done, he had earned the right to die with his boots on.
But not this time. Not this mission.
WITH THAT THOUGHT, SHAFER focused on the satellite shots, resolving to glean every detail he could. He would send the overheads to Wells, of course, but they wouldn’t be nearly this sharp when they arrived. The agency would have no choice but to degrade them, in part because the file sizes were far too large for a civilian Internet account. And Wells wouldn’t have a display panel as good as his, either.
Shafer knocked out two locations quickly. They were nothing more than well-guarded hash farms, complete with tractors and pesticide sprayers. The third, in the northern foothills of the Lebanon range, was trickier. Mysterious tarp-covered mounds and half-buried concrete sheds were scattered across it. Still, Shafer thought he was looking at a Hezbollah arms depot, not a jihadi camp. Only two cars and three unarmed men were visible. The mounds and sheds most likely held howitzers and missile launchers — or possibly decoys to siphon Israeli air attacks from Hezbollah’s real depots.
Which left the fourth farm, the first that Wells and Gaffan had spotted, the one Wells believed was correct. Two different Keyholes had taken overhead passes, one just before noon and the second at about two a.m. the next day. Noon was the ideal time for satellite shots. Direct overhead sunlight minimized shadows and shined brightly off metal. The reflections helped the image-processing software that searched for half-hidden bits of steel and aluminum, pipes that might be bunker vents or coin-shaped disks that could be mines. Shafer was looking for more obvious features. From what Wells said, this camp would have been recently built and only semipermanent, with privacy and size as its main considerations.
Wells’s instincts looked on target. A one-story barracks sat in a rocky valley a mile south of the gate that seemed to mark the property line. Shafer judged it would be invisible from anywhere outside the property. Its concrete was white and new, but the construction was shoddy. A small generator at the back of the barracks powered a string of bulbs. Three SUVs and a ten-wheel panel truck were parked in front. A blue tarp covered the truck, though Shafer could faintly make out Arabic letters in the back corner, where the tarp had come loose.
Just past the barracks, the road turned west, toward the mountains. It dead-ended a quarter-mile up at a two-story concrete house, cheap and gaudy in hash-farmer style, with balconies and filigrees. But the house’s yellow paint was faded, its concrete cracked. Shafer guessed that it had been abandoned a few years back, long before the barracks was built. Two satellite television receivers sat on the roof. One was old, its wires disconnected, the other new. No transmission equipment, though. A new diesel generator and a half-dozen barrels sat beside the house, presumably fuel from the gas station in Qaa. Next to them was a small shack.
The road between the barracks and the house was well-trod. Shafer guessed they slept in the barracks, trained and ate in the house. A couple other details struck him. A deep pit had been dug near the barracks. Given the hardness of the Bekaa’s soil, excavating the pit would have required backhoes. It would have been dug only for a good reason. Maybe live explosives training.
Behind the house, he spotted what might have been a makeshift helicopter pad, flat ground with a small white X painted at its center. He might have been wrong. No helicopter was visible, and he didn’t see anywhere to hide one. Still. A helicopter pad.
His phone interrupted him. Vinny Duto. The DCI.
“Can you come up?”
“Love to,” Shafer lied.
Duto’s office was on the seventh floor of the Original Headquarters Building. The view was nice, but the company wasn’t. Duto had tightened his control over the intelligence community in the last year, thanks in part to Wells and Shafer. In their last mission, they had unwittingly helped him topple his biggest rival, the director of national intelligence, a job created after September 11 to serve as a check on the CIA.
But Duto might have regained control on his own. Technically, the director of central intelligence reported to the DNI. But the DNI didn’t have any clandestine operatives of his own, only analysts. Analysis was nice, but power came from the operational side. And operations belonged to Duto. With the DNI neutered, Duto had no real rivals for control. But power hadn’t mellowed him. Not even close. Wall Street bankers never had enough money, and men like Duto never had enough power. Shafer knew that Duto found him — and especially Wells, who couldn’t be controlled and who lived by a set of principles that Duto would never understand — deeply irritating.
Though Duto had certainly outsmarted them both last year.
Shafer walked into Duto’s office to find it nearly dark, the electrically controlled shades down, as Duto examined the Lebanese overheads on his own flat-panel. Shafer sat. Duto ignored him for a couple minutes, flicking through the images. When he turned off the screen, the shades rose automatically. “Pretty pictures. What’s Wells going to do with them?”
“Hi, Vinny. Good to see you. You too. How’s the wife? The kids?”
“Yeah, yeah. What about the overheads?”
“Wells hasn’t told me, but I imagine he’s going to raid that camp. As you know.”
“And you signed off on sending satellite shots over the Internet?”
“Is there some plausible deniability thing happening here? Aren’t we past that? It’s just overheads. You can find them on Google Earth.”
“Not at five-centimeter resolution.”
“We’ll degrade them. Anyway, if we’re gonna use him, we should help him.”
Duto nodded, conceding the point. He’d given in way too easily. Shafer wondered why he’d bothered with this meeting at all. The next sentence provided the answer.
“Is Wells talking to Abdullah, Ellis?”
Shafer couldn’t see the percentage in lying. “Not sure, but I think so. The jet that picked him up in New York belonged to the Saudi government. And the DGSE”—the French intelligence service—“say that Abdullah and Miteb were in Nice when he was there. So probably yes.”
“So Abdullah is actively involved here. The king of Saudi Arabia. What’s Wells doing that his security services can’t?”
“Maybe Abdullah doesn’t trust the
“Maybe you should ask your boy for a straight answer.”
“My boy doesn’t work for us anymore. In case you haven’t noticed.”
“We’re helping him.”
“And he’s helping us. And if I push any harder, he’ll go dark.”
“All right. But you need to understand something, Ellis. Across the river they’re pulling a strat rev on the KSA”—a strategic review on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. “Us, State, NSC”—the National Security Council. “Joint Chiefs sitting in but don’t have a brief. They’re focusing on our relationship with the House of Saud.”
