“I’ll send along the file information on the writer, and what we know about the Canaries. We’re also sending Ms. Howorth down there. She’ll be your backup.”
CJ had been left behind in Berlin to wrap up some loose ends there.
“Very well. When do I leave?”
“We have a ticket for you at the counter at Alicante Airport. Your flight leaves in eighty-five minutes.”
“Then I guess I’d better pack and get over there.” She laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“Feng, sir. He’s going to be
“What is the ship’s position now?” Rubens asked.
Marie Telach checked one of the Art Room displays. “Twenty-three forty-five north … sixty-five thirty-three east,” she replied. “One hundred three nautical miles southwest of Karachi. Course two two three degrees, speed seventeen knots.”
“A week to Haifa.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the
“Still shadowing the target, sir. Ninety nautical miles to the south and on a parallel course.”
Rubens frowned at one of the monitors, which showed an aerial view of an aging, plodding merchant ship, tiny against the endless blue of the Gulf of Oman. The image was being relayed from a tilt-rotor Eagle Eye UAV remotely piloted from the
A CIA agent in Karachi had come up with the information that a number of containers supposedly carrying small nuclear weapons had been transported yesterday from Jinnah International Airport to a Russian freighter, the
In fact, there was no reason to suppose that the twelve weapons had been split up.
Rubens wondered just how much they could trust the CIA’s source. This agent was a young Pakistani named Haroon who’d purportedly been turned after the ISI had arrested his sister and his father a year before, accusing them of being Taliban. Both were still in prison; the State Department was supposed to be making inquiries about the two, a part of the package that had brought Haroon to the U.S. Embassy and the CIA’s senior resident there.
It felt convenient to Rubens, and he didn’t trust convenient.
Still, the man was the only hard source they had at the moment regarding the whereabouts of the stolen nukes. If they were on board the
If they could get the authorization to do so. The administration was — as General Douglas had pointed out that morning — reluctant to board a foreign ship on a suspicion,
What if the ship couldn’t be stopped, and nuclear warheads reached the Israeli port?
American targets? Or Israeli?
It scarcely mattered. Millions of people might die. Those warheads
To that end, he’d already ordered Dean and Akulinin to Karachi, where they would be working with the CIA to get confirmation of Haroon’s information.
And there was, perhaps, one other thing he could do …
“I’ll be in my office, Marie.”
“Yes, sir.”
He had a phone call to make.
13
It was, Dean reflected, a matter of every spy agency for itself.
When in Tajikistan, the Desk Three operators had had to maintain their covers as foreign military personnel. They couldn’t work with the Russian FSB because that organization had been thoroughly penetrated by the Russian
Once across the border into Afghanistan, they’d learned that even NATO had been penetrated somehow, and they’d been less than open with their German hosts. So far as NATO was concerned, Dean, Akulinin, and Alekseyevna were journalists who’d needed rescuing.
Now, less than twenty-four hours later, Dean and his partner were in Pakistan, a nation supposedly dedicated to fighting terrorism and bringing down Islamic militarist fanatics whether they were Taliban, al-Qaeda, or JeM — but the two NSA officers had to maintain their deep cover. Many members of the Pakistani ISI, both in the rank and file and in the leadership, were secretly pro-Taliban, pro-Islamist, or both, and simply could not be trusted. The ISI had scored some significant victories in recent years against the militants, especially in the case of suicide bombings on Pakistani soil, and yet there continued to be major security leaks, covert operations compromised, and even high-ranking militant leaders who lived and moved openly within Pakistan’s population, often as revered and respected clerics calling the faithful to jihad.
Maulana Masood Azhar, the Army of Mohammad’s founder and leader, was a case in point.
Dean and Akulinin moved slowly through the crowd that had spilled out onto the street from the courtyard of the Jami’ah Binoria Madrasah — a large and well-known Islamic university located in the sprawl of northwestern Karachi in the heart of an industrial district with the unlikely name of Metrovil. The mob was as raucous and noisy as the riot in the streets of Kunduz that morning; this time, though, the excitement was being generated by the speech coming from loudspeakers mounted high up on the madrasah’s walls. It was Friday, the Muslim holy day, and the sermon was being delivered to an enthusiastic crowd. Dean estimated that several thousand people were packed into the university’s grounds and the surrounding city streets.
“What’s he saying?” Akulinin asked as a harsh, nasal voice brayed from the speakers in Urdu. “He sounds pretty passionate about it.”
“The usual rant,” Jeff Rockman’s voice replied through their implants. “God is merciful, God is just, and God is going to mop the floor with Jews, fornicators, and Americans.”
A fresh burst of cheering arose from the crowd. “These people really eat this stuff up,” Dean said.
“This would definitely not be a good time to tell them you guys are American infidels,” Rockman said. “Wait a sec … I’m reading the translation off my screen … Okay, now he’s saying that the promised end of days is upon us, and God Himself is going to wipe America away in a deluge of righteousness … He has held back His hand to give America time to repent, but now the time of merciful forbearance is past … and when the eyes of the faithful behold the divine hand of God sweeping away His enemies, all of His faithful will put aside their differences and … Jesus, this guy ought to be a televangelist.”
“I think we can do without the running commentary,” Dean said. “How far to the target?”
“Twelve meters. And a bit more to your left. He’s hanging back, on the very edge of the crowd.”
