“I will report your conduct back to the president, Admiral Jackson. We are dealing with an important national security matter and you, as DDI, are not cooperating. Don’t go far.” The admiral remained mute and the two stared at each other for a few seconds. There was an edge in the room. She flicked her fingers at him. “Dismissed,” she said, casually.
12
Michael Buckingham, the American ambassador to Pakistan, was momentarily lost in the aroma of a morning cup of coffee in his corner office at the main embassy complex in Islamabad. The door banged open and Jordan Sunlenew, the deputy ambassador, accompanied by two Marines, strode in with purpose.
“Jordan, what the hell—” began the ambassador.
“I’m sorry, Michael, but I’ve got instructions directly from brass at the State Department. You are under arrest.” The muscles of his face were scrunched together—he looked as though he was being forced to eat a lemon.
“I’ve been ordered to take you back to DC.”
“Lovely,” replied the ambassador, not completely surprised by the development. “Do I have time to pack?”
“No, you don’t. There is a plane waiting for us at Benazir Bhutto International Airport and I have orders to take you there at once. But there is something more immediate. You know those two troublemakers, Richard Lawrence and Zak Goldberg, they were here recently, weren’t they?”
“Yes, Jordan, they were. Earlier yesterday morning.”
“They had a third fellow, a captive—Kumar Hanaman—with them, didn’t they?”
The ambassador shrugged. He had nothing to hide. “Yes, they did. They had broken him out of some kind of mountain prison complex owned by an Afghan drug dealer.”
“Where did they go?”
“They didn’t tell me. They were in a hurry and were here for twenty minutes or less.”
“How did they leave here?”
“They took one of the embassy vehicles. A new Mercedes. I let them take it.”
“It would be fully tricked out with GPS and all?” asked Jordan.
“Come on, Jord, it was a brand-new Merc. The thing could probably drive itself.”
“I will need the model and the serial number,” said Jordan. “Instructions from DC.”
“Sure. Our internal business admin section can get that for you.”
“Now, Michael, you know that this incident of blowing Kumar out of Inzar Ghar is not a Sunday drive. Richard and Zak had all kinds of backup. Nobody even knew Kumar was there, let alone where Inzar Ghar is, let alone how you engineer a jailbreak in a foreign jurisdiction without anyone knowing about it. Who in the intelligence community cobbled all of this together?”
“I don’t think it’s any big secret, really,” replied the ambassador. “Richard and Zak worked for the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. I don’t know who the individual personalities were, but the lead agency in this was probably TTIC. Maybe it was Dan Alexander, the director there, or Liam Rhodes, his deputy, or Admiral Jackson, the DDI. But I honestly don’t know anything more than that.”
Once the Mercedes’ ID information was provided, Jordan sent a text on his encrypted sat phone. The text was received nine time zones to the west, by Tyra Baylor’s phone. She smiled and called the Springfield, Virginia, headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “We need to identify and locate a GPS transponder—from a new Mercedes, somewhere in Pakistan” were the instructions. She passed on the Mercedes’ serial number.
She called the president next. “Matt, this is where we are,” she said. “Kumar is in a new Mercedes somewhere in Pakistan. We have the make, model, and serial number. The NGA is hunting for its transponder signal now. Once we have it, I will talk to the people at USCENTCOM. They have the capability to take it out, but it’s Pakistan and you know what they’re like. They get all uppity if we fire a missile in their airspace. Fort MacDill will need an executive order to proceed. Can you get one of the aides there to draft it up?”
“Will do that. I will convey this to my chief of staff. You do your part, I’ll do mine. This Kumar problem should be solved within the hour.”
Next Tyra called the Fort MacDill headquarters of USCENTCOM. It took mere seconds to be patched through to the general in charge of the entire central command. She explained the problem, and told him to stand by for an executive order.
She stretched in the large Chevy Suburban that was taking her back to the White House from the Pentagon, where she had interviewed the admiral. Once she had stroked her way into the White House, she acquired and exercised God-like power, and loved it.
It was less than half an hour after Jordan had spoken to Ambassador Buckingham that several highly stealth Predator MK-7 drones, flying at 60,000 feet in Pakistani airspace, changed course and began to fly lazy eights above the Indus River Valley corridor in central Pakistan. The drones were armed with Hellfire missiles.
13
“Where are we headed, Rich?” Zak asked.
“Away from the embassy,” Richard replied. “If this was here a rogue operation, they’ll go to the embassy as ground zero and start searching in concentric circles from there.”
“Good. Lovely. Who are ‘they’? Or does that sound too paranoid?”
“Paranoia is good here. If we are running rogue, ‘they’ are probably the American government. Or military. Or the CIA, or some combination. Could also be the Pakistani security forces. They want Kumar dead. Kumar alive is an enormous threat. Yousseff has created a brilliant cover, and Kumar can totally destroy it.”
“And that would mean, logically, that Yousseff’s people in Afghanistan want Kumar dead,” added Zak.
“Much more than that. They know that we are in Pakistan. That means the Pakistani ISI is after us, which means the cops are after us, which means the CIA, the FBI, the—”
“That’s the long version. It’s obvious that ‘they’ are everybody.” Zak turned around and looked at Kumar, scrunched up in the Mercedes’ back seat, his knees close to his chin, with his arms circling his ankles. “You’re a rock star, Kumar. Everybody wants you.”
Kumar didn’t bother looking up and maintained his
