Acts of War

Washington, D. C.

Bob Herbert rolled his wheelchair into Paul Hood's office. 'Mike was right as usual,' the intelligence chief said. 'The NRO confirms that the Ataturk Dam's been heavily damaged.'

Hood exhaled tensely. He turned to his computer and typed in a single word: 'Affirmative.' He appended this to his emergency Code Red E-mail of 9:47 a.m. which contained Mike Rodgers's initial evaluation. Then he sent the confirmation to General Ken Vanzandt, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also copied it to Secretary of State Av Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Ernesto Colon, Central Intelligence Agency Director Larry Rachlin, and super-hawk National Security Advisor Steve Burkow.

'How close is the ROC to the affected region?' Hood asked.

'They're about fifty miles to the southeast,' Herbert said. 'Well out of the danger zone.'

'How well is well?' ' Hood asked. 'Mike's idea of a buffer zone isn't the same as other people's.'

'I didn't ask Mike,' Herbert said. 'I asked Phil Katzen. He had experience with the great Midwest flood of 1993 and he did some quick computations. He says that within the fifty miles there's a good fifteen-to-twenty-mile cushion. Phil figures the Euphrates will rise about twenty feet straight down through Syria to Lake Assad.That won't hurt the Syrians much, since a lot of that area is seasonally dry as toast and deserted. But it's going to flood out a lot of Turks who live in villages around the river.'

Darrell McCaskey arrived as Herbert was speaking. The slim, forty-eight-year-old former FBI agent, now interagency liaison, shut the door behind him and leaned quietly against it.

'What do we have on the perpetrators?' Hood asked.

'Satellite reconnaissance showed a Turkish 500D leaving the site,' Herbert said. 'Apparently, it was the same helicopter stolen from the border patrol earlier in the day.'

'Where's it headed?' Hood asked.

'We don't know,' Herbert said. 'There're a pair of F-4s looking for the chopper now.'

'Looking for it?' Hood said. 'I thought we had it on satellite.'

'We did,' Herbert said. 'But sometime between one picture and the next it disappeared.'

'Shot down?'

'Nope,' Herbert said. 'The Turks would've told us.'

'Maybe,' Hood said.

'All right,' Herbert agreed. 'Even if they didn't, we'd have spotted the wreckage. There's no sign of the helicopter for a radius of fifty miles from the last place it was seen.'

'What do you make of that?' Hood asked.

'I honestly don't know,' Herbert said. 'If there were any caves in the area which were large enough, I'd say they flew right in and parked it. We're still looking, though.'

Hood was annoyed. He wasn't like Mike Rodgers, who enjoyed putting clues together and solving mysteries. The banker in him liked information orderly, complete, and now.

'We'll find the chopper,' Herbert added. 'I'm having the last satellite photograph analyzed to get the exact speed and direction of the 500D. We're also running a complete study of the area's geography. We'll try to find a place like a cave or canyon where a helicopter could hide.'

'All right,' Hood said. 'In the meantime, what do we do about the ROC? Just leave it?'

'Why not?' Herbert asked. 'It was designed for on-site reconnaissance. You can't get any more on-site than this.'

'That's true,' Hood agreed, 'but I'm more concerned about security. If this attack is a taste of things to come, the ROC is relatively vulnerable. They've only got two Strikers covering four open sides.'

'There's also a Turkish security officer,' McCaskey added.

'He seems like a good man,' Herbert said. 'I checked him out. I'm sure Mike did too.'

'That's three people,' Hood said. 'Just three.'

'Plus General Michael Rodgers,' Herbert said respectfully, 'who is a platoon unto himself. Anyway, I don't think Mike would let himself be evacuated now. This is the kind of thing he lives for.'

Hood sat back. Rodgers's career as a soldier included two tours of Vietnam, command of a mechanized brigade in the Persian Gulf, and leading a covert Striker operation into North Korea. Rodgers wasn't going to run from a terrorist attack on a dam.

'You're right about that,' Hood admitted. 'Mike will want to stay. But Mike isn't the one who has make that decision. We've also got Mary Rose, Phil, and Lowell in the saddle and they're all civilians. I just wish we knew whether the attack was an isolated event or the first salvo of something larger.'

'Obviously, we'll know more when we find out who's responsible,' McCaskey said.

'Well give me something to chew on,' Hood said. 'Who do you think was behind this?'

'I've spoken with the CIA and with the Turkish Special Forces, and also with the Mossad in Israel,' McCaskey said. 'They're all saying it's either Syrians or Muslim fundamentalists within Turkey. There's a strong argument for both. The Muslim Fundamentalists desperately want to weaken Turkey's ties with Israel and the West. By attacking the infrastructure, they place a burden on the populace and turn them against the government.'

'If that's the case,' Hood said, 'we can expect more attacks.'

'Right,' McCaskey replied.

'Yeah, but I'm not going for that one,' Herbert said. 'The fundamentalists are already pretty damn strong in Turkey. Why would they try to take by force what they can conceivably win on the next ballot?'

'Because they're impatient,' McCaskey pointed out. 'Iran is paying a lot of their bills and Tehran wants to see results.'

'Iran has already put Turkey in the 'win' column,' Herbert replied. 'It's just a matter of time. Their big playground now is Bosnia. They were outfitting the Bosnians with arms and advisors during the Balkan war. Not only are those advisors still there, they're multiplying like guppies. That's how the fundamentalists plan on getting into the heartland of Europe. As far as Turkey goes, Iran's going to let the political situation move at its own pace.'

'Not if Turkey continues to rely more and more on Israeli military assets and on financial aid and intelligence from the United States,' McCaskey said. 'Iran doesn't want another U.S. stronghold in their backyard.'

'What about the Syrians?' Hood interjected. McCaskey and Herbert always went at each other like this, passionately but respectfully. Darrell Consensus and Bob Gut Instinct, psychologist Liz Gordon had once called them. That was why Hood had asked McCaskey to pop in when Herbert phoned that he had news about the attack. Between the two of them, Hood always ended up with a concise but comprehensive overview of a situation — though it was necessary to keep them from turning it into a political science debate.

'With the Syrians we have two possibilities,' McCaskey said. 'The terrorists could be Syrian extremists who are sold on the idea of the Middle East becoming Greater Syria—'

'Adding it to their collection, like Lebanon,' Herbert said bitterly.

Hood nodded. It was the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that had cost the intelligence officer his wife and the use of his legs.

'Correct,' said McCaskey. 'Or what seems more likely is that the dam-busters are Syrian Kurds.'

'They're Kurds, all right,' Herbert said confidently. 'Syrian extremists don't do anything without the approval of the military, and the military takes its marching orders from the Syrian President himself. If the Syrian government wanted to spark hostilities with Turkey, they wouldn't do it this way.'

'What would they do?' Hood asked.

'They'd do what aggressor nations always do,' Herbert said. 'They'd hold war games on the border, massing troops there and provoking an incident to draw the Turks over. The Syrians would never set foot in Turkey. As we used to say in the military, they like receiving. It goes back to 1967 when Israeli tanks rolled in on the third day of the Six-Day War. Defending their homeland makes Syrians look and feel like freedom fighters instead of like aggressors. That helps to rally other Arab nations around them.'

'In addition to which,' McCaskey added, 'except for 1967, the Syrians generally like to fight proxy wars. They gave arms to Iran to fight Iraq in 1982, let the Lebanese kill each other during fifteen years of civil war, then went in and set up a puppet regime — that sort of thing.'

Herbert looked at McCaskey. 'Then you agree with me?'

'No.' McCaskey grinned. 'You agree with me.'