Dom Caruso was already there, downstairs in the lobby, talking to the security men on staff.
Ryan walked up to him. “What’s going on?” Dom walked up to his cousin and leaned into his ear. “Worst-case scenario, cuz.” Ryan’s eyes widened. He knew what that meant. “Islamic bomb?” Caruso nodded. “Internal CIA traffic says a Pakistani armaments train got hit last night local time.
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The two twenty-kiloton nuclear bombs stolen from the Pakistani Air Force found themselves, just days later, in the skies over Pakistan. Rehan and his men had the bombs packed and crated into twelve-by-five-by-five-foot containers that were labeled “Textile Manufacturing, Ltd.” They were then placed on an Antonov An-26 cargo plane operated by Vision Air, a Pakistani charter airline.
Their intermediate destination was Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.
As much as General Rehan would like to send the Dagestanis on their way, to get them out of his country and somewhere where they could publicize what they had done and threaten the world with their bombs and their missiles, h e knew Georgi Safronov was smarter than all the other cell members and insurgency leaders and even any of the government operatives he had worked with in his career. Georgi knew as much about nuclear weapons as Rehan did, and the general knew he needed to put one hundred percent of his efforts behind an authentic preparation of Safronov’s operation.
To do that he would need two things: a private and secure place, outside Pakistan, to arm the bombs and fit the bombs into the Dnepr-1 payload containers, and someone with the technical know-how to do this.
Bilateral trade had increased precipitously between Tajikistan and Pakistan in the past four years, so travel from Pakistan to Dushanbe was commonplace. Dushanbe was also almost directly between Pakistan and the ultimate destination of the weapons, the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The An-26 flew out of Lahore with its two cargo crates and its twelve passengers: Rehan, Safronov, Khan, seven of Rehan’s personal security, and two Pakistani nuclear munitions experts. The Jamaat Shariat forces traveled out of the country via a second Vision Air charter that would take them to Dushanbe, as well.
Rehan’s JIM Directorate had already spread bribes around Tajik customs and airport officials; there would be no impediments to either aircraft’s offloading its cargo and crew once on the ground. A Tajik with the Dushanbe city government who had a long history as a paid informant and foreign agent of the ISI would be waiting on touchdown with trucks and drivers and more crated cargo that had recently arrived from Moscow.
The Campus worked twenty-four/seven looking for the nuclear bombs. The CIA had picked up ISI chatter within hours of the hijacking, and Langley and the National Counterterrorism Center at Liberty Crossing spent the intervening days looking into ISI involvement.
NCTC had more information on Riaz Rehan, some of it courtesy of The Campus and much of it thanks to the work of Melanie Kraft, so Jack Ryan and his fellow analysts found themselves virtually looking over the shoulder of Kraft for much of the time. It made Ryan feel creepy, but if there was anything actionable that Melanie found in her research, The Campus was in a position to act immediately.
Tony Wills had been working with Ryan; more than once he had looked at Melanie Kraft’s research and commented, “Your girlfriend is smarter than you are, Ryan.”
Jack thought Wills was half right. She was smarter than he was, true, but he wasn’t sure she was his girlfriend.
The Pakistanis did an admirable job hiding the loss of the two nuclear devices from their own public and from the world’s press for forty-eight hours. During this time they scrambled to find the culprits and locate the bombs, but the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency came up empty. There was an immediate fear that it had been an inside job, and there was a related fear that the ISI was involved. But the ISI and the PDF were infinitely more powerful than the FIA, so these fears were not effectively explored as part of the investigation.
But when the news finally got out that there had been a massive terrorist act within Pakistan on a rail line, the Pakistani press put together, through their sources in the government, that nuclear devices had been on board the train. When it was confirmed, within hours, that the two devices, type and yield unspecified, had been hijacked by parties unknown, it came with a very public and very specific promise from the highest corridors of power in the military, civilian government, and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission that the theft of the weapons was of no great consequence. It was explained that the devices were equipped with fail-safe arming codes that one would need to render the devices active.
All the parties who said this publicly firmly believed what they were saying, and it was true, although one of the parties did leave out a critical morsel of information that was highly relevant.
The director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission did not tell his peers in the government and military, and he did not tell the public at large, that two of his top weaponization physicists, two men able to bypass the arming codes and reconfigure the detonation systems, had gone missing at the exact moment the bombs were lost.
The next morning the two crates claiming to be property of Textile Manufacturing, Ltd, sat on a dusty concrete floor in the center of a warehouse at a school bus fleet maintenance yard on Kurban Rakhimov, in the northern part of Dushanbe. General Rehan and Georgi Safronov both were very happy with the choice of facility for this portion of the mission. The property was massive and fenced and gated on all sides, blocking the view from the tree-lined streets of the more than fifty foreign men working and patrolling the grounds inside. Dozens of trucks and school busses sat in various states of operational condition, which made the Dagestani and Pakistani trucks invisible, even from the air. And the large maintenance building was large enough for several busses, which made it more than large enough for the huge bombs. Further, there was a large array of hoists and rolling stands to lift and move the massive school bus engines that were scattered around the facility.
Of the people present, the only ones doing anything more than standing around were the two scientists who worked for PAEC, Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission. They were missing back in Pakistan, and the few people who knew about their disappearance but did not know the men themselves suspected they had been kidnapped by a terrorist force. But those who knew them and knew of the missing nukes did not think for a moment that anyone was forcing them to do anything. That they were Islamic radicals was widely known among their peers. On this matter some had been accepting, and some had been uncomfortable yet quiet.
Both of these groups of people suspected these men were involved.
The two scientists, Dr. Nishtar and Dr. Noon, were united in their belief that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were not the property of the civilian government, nor were they fabricated and stockpiled, at great cost and at great risk they would hasten to add, only to be used as some sort of hypothetical deterrent. An invisible chess piece.
No. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons belonged to the Ummah, the community of Muslims, and they could and
And the two scientists believed in Riaz Rehan, and they trusted that now was the right time because he said that now was the right time.
The dour foreign men from the Caucasus all around them in the school bus maintenance facility were of the faithful, even if they were not Pakistani Muslims. Drs. Noon and Nishtar did not understand all of what was going on, but they were quite clear on their mission. They were to arm the weapons, they were to oversee the loading of the weapons into the rocket payload containers, and then they were to return to Pakistan with the ISI general, where they would remain in hiding until Rehan told them it was safe to come out in public and take their bow as
