Death Wave

The Jackal will take care of him as well, and it will again look like suicide.

FENG

: Just so the Jackal knows that he must not call attention to Wrath of God in any way. Pender and Carlylse are unimportant. Their books may even help us in the long run. Do not call undue attention to them, or we could lose the, the psychological effect you are looking for within the Muslim world.

SHAH

: The Jackal knows what he is doing, Mr. Feng.

FENG

: I hope so. What’s the matter, Mr. Chatel? You look unhappy.

CHATEL

: I don’t know. What you’re planning, what we’re doing … This is a lot bigger, a lot more, uh, far-reaching than you told me when you asked me to help with this. I’m having some doubts.

FENG

: We are paying you a great deal of money, Mr. Chatel. We are paying you not to have doubts.

CHATEL

: I know, I know.

FENG

: And there will be a lot more money when the project is done. A very great deal of money. So do not doubt.

CHATEL

: The girl is coming back.

FENG

: We’ll talk more later. In my room. (In English.) Ah! Miss Lau! Thank you.

The conversation turned to more mundane things — COSCO’s profit margin and Feng’s hope to open new markets in Spain. Telach touched a button on her keyboard, then pulled a printout of the conversation from a printer.

Bill Rubens was going to want to see this, and quickly.

12

OFFICE OF DIRNSA

NSA HEADQUARTERS

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

THURSDAY, 1125 HOURS EDT

Rubens waited as Lieutenant General Alexander Douglas finished reading the transcript. The director of the NSA had agreed to meet with Rubens on impossibly short notice. Rubens had secured the appointment by using the code word “Armageddon” in his request to Douglas’ secretary. Using that word meant that the subject of the meeting was nothing less than cataclysmic in scope, was an immediate threat endangering the entire nation, and was supremely credible. During Rubens’ eleven-year tenure as deputy director of the NSA and head of Desk Three, the code had been used exactly three times — twice when there’d been solid reports of nuclear weapons smuggled into U.S. ports, and on the morning of 9/11.

They sat at the small conference table in a private meeting room off Douglas’ office, with the morning sun filtering in through the tinted windows overlooking the sprawl of Fort Meade and the Maryland countryside. Brigadier General Howard Noelle sat to Rubens’ left, the two of them opposite Douglas. Noelle was deputy director of the Central Security Service and, according to the organization charts, the number three man in the Agency.

The CSS had been established in 1972 as a combat support agency within the Department of Defense. While Douglas double-hatted as chief of the CSS, it was Noelle who actually managed the partnership between the cryptologic elements of the various military services and the NSA. Anything coming over Douglas’ desk flying the Armageddon flag would sooner or later involve the U.S. military, so it was important that Noelle be present as well.

Douglas adjusted his round-framed glasses and looked up. “Bill … this is pretty raw. An overheard conversation in Spain? There’s not a lot to go on here.”

“This may be the break we’re looking for, sir,” Noelle said. He’d already read the transcript and discussed the high points with Rubens during their twenty-minute wait to see Douglas. “A solid link between Operation Haystack and a terrorist plan to attack the United States.”

“Yes … but how? What’s the target? According to this, there’s a … a shipment of something going somewhere, but no indication of where. And we don’t know for certain that ‘the shipment’ is comprised of the missing suitcase nukes.”

“Actually, sir,” Rubens said, “General Noelle is right. We have a pretty strong case here.”

“Would you care to enlighten me?”

“Of course. In the transcript, Feng mentions something called Operation Fire from Heaven. In Arabic, that’s Nar-min-Sama. We’ve been chasing that one since our friends in the Mossad tipped us off a couple of weeks ago. We think it may refer to a planned nuclear strike against Israel.”

“Yes …”

“Feng links that with another operation, Harakat Radab min Allah. Operation Wrath of God. Feng is insisting here that Fire from Heaven be delayed until well after Wrath of God is implemented. It sounds like a two-tiered attack.”

“Hit one target, then take out the second while the opposition is still reeling from the effects of the first,” Noelle put in.

“A diversion?”

“Possibly,” Rubens said. “From the tone Feng is taking here, it sounds like two different attacks by two different groups on two different targets, but either the chances of the second will be improved if the other attack is launched first, or launching the second attack too early will give something away, maybe make the first attack less effective.”

“It still sounds pretty thin,” Douglas said. “We have to know the target.”

“Feng also mentions a name, a nom de guerre, al-Wawi. The Jackal.”

“Carlos the Jackal? Big-name terrorist in the seventies? Isn’t he dead?”

“He’s serving a life sentence in Clairvaux Prison, in France, sir. We checked as soon as the name popped up.”

The original Jackal had been the rather pathetic, overweight Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan leftist revolutionary who’d made a name for himself back in the 1970s. Several names, in fact. He’d become known as “Carlos” when he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A British newspaper, the Guardian, had nicknamed him “the Jackal” when The Day of the Jackal, a novel by thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, was found with his belongings.

In fact, Carlos had fallen far short of the myth-making and hype and was not at all the super-assassin of fiction. His most notorious escapades had been a raid on an OPEC conference in Vienna where three people had been killed, and a later string of bombings in France and Germany. The man eventually had been abducted by his own security guards in Sudan, then turned over to French intelligence, and was now in prison.

“So this is a new Jackal,” Douglas said, thoughtful.

“Yes, sir.” Rubens opened his briefcase and extracted a file folder, which he opened and passed to Douglas. “This is al-Wawi, the new Jackal. Ibrahim Hussain Azhar. He led a team of Mujahideen in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines A300 Airbus in 1999. The aircraft was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where it was closely guarded by the Taliban.

“After a standoff lasting seven days, India released three prisoners to secure the Airbus and its passengers. Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And Maulana Masood Azhar.”

“Azhar?”