Barracuda 945 (7 page)

But just before he terminated the conversation, the Brigadier offered one sentence of assistance. “Tell you what, Johnny. You mentioned Hebron, battle of the Jerusalem Road. I did hear we lost a couple of our chaps in that. I expect they were SAS and that will be in the public records. Have a look there.” It was a classic backside-covering sentence from a senior official.

John Dwyer replaced the receiver thoughtfully.
Don’t know how the hell to do that,
he thought.
Since I don’t even know their bloody names. And no one’s going to tell me.

He decided the story was beyond his expertise in the field of newspaper sleuthing. But he called his editor with the scant information he had, and the editor, who was equally inept at such down-and-dirty investigations, tipped off his news editor, a bellicose, ex-crime reporter named Tom Howard, from Liverpool, who probably should have been a policeman.

Tom put six men on it. Two at the Public Records Office, checking the death certificates of all serving military personnel from May to July. One at the Hereford County Records Office checking deaths, burials, and funerals. One at Whitehall, to try and pressure the Press Office into revealing all in the public interest, and another in the town of Hereford, checking pubs, garages, and supermarkets for rumors of SAS men who had recently been killed.

They did not succeed in nailing the story down. But they turned up some details, and produced a slightly half-baked, but nonetheless intriguing, story for those interested in such matters:

Four days later, a team of London
Daily Mail
reporters, following up the
Telegraph
report, cracked the story. The headline announced:

MYSTERY OF THE MISSING SAS MAJOR

North London Shipping Tycoon

Accuses MOD of ‘Lying about my son’

There followed a detailed interview with a “devastated” Richard Kerman and his wife, Naz. Without a qualm, Major Kerman’s father outlined every last inquiry by commanders of his son’s Regiment, and investigators from the Ministry.

“Our son is missing,” he said. “We have heard absolutely nothing from him since he left England last February. The mission was of course classified, and they did not even tell us he had been in Israel until August—three months after he disappeared.”

Mr. Kerman pointed out that his wife was “brokenhearted,” and it was obvious there was a great deal not being told to them or anyone else. “We don’t know if Ray is alive or dead,” he said. “That’s a terrible burden for any parent to cope with. At the
moment we are just living from day to day, hoping for news of our son.”

And in that, Mr. and Mrs. Kerman were not alone. British Military Intelligence did not believe him dead. And they very much wanted to know where he was. But for rather different reasons.

Major Ray Kerman knew a great deal too much about British Special Forces in the Holy Land—enough to cause a public outcry if the truth should ever come out. He was also in his own right, a military treasure to any other government or even a group of dissidents.

Major Kerman was a lethal exponent of unarmed combat, a polished operator in every form of military activity, a man who could turn an armed disorganized rabble into a smooth, efficient force against the West.

Ray Kerman, Harrow educated, star of his year at Sandhurst? That was one thing. Ravi Rashood, former student of the Koran, missing somewhere off the Jerusalem Road in Hebron? That was entirely another. And Britain’s innately suspicious Ministry of Defence understood the problem all too well.

No one in Whitehall or Hereford would ever comment on the newspaper stories, but they found their way around the world in short order. Within two hours of publication, the Mystery of Ray Kerman, the Missing SAS Major, was on the Internet.

Shortly after 10
P
.
M
. (Eastern time), the CIA’s Middle Eastern desk in Langley, Virginia, electronically fired the
Daily Mail
’s story onto the Duty Officer’s desk in the Military Intelligence Division of the National Security Agency (NSA), in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The calculated speed with which the CIA moved on this was revealing. All Western Intelligence Agencies, and their natural allies, Special Forces and Special Agents, are apt to react with horror at the possible defection of one of their own. And the CIA had been tracking the situation for several weeks.

But this new development in the British press, disclosing the Muslim past of the vanished officer, had ratcheted up the entire scenario by several notches. The midnight electronic communication from Langley to Fort Meade was a clear signal the CIA
wanted the world’s largest and most powerful Intelligence agency to go to work.

The NSA employs almost 39,000 people. It is more a city than a government agency, a vast complex of glass modern buildings, glowering behind razor-wire fences, patrolled by hundreds of armed police and bomb-sniffing dogs. It makes Beijing’s old Forbidden City look like open house. The NSA is known as Crypto City.

Behind those gleaming bulletproof walls stand battalions of supercomputers with databases of septillion operations per second (that’s a 1 followed by forty-two zeroes). In here they don’t do seconds. They do femtoseconds—one quadrillionth of a second. This is military micromanagement gone berserk. Fort Meade sits at the center of a gigantic global listening network, connected to the satellites, intercepting, eavesdropping, hearing all, saying nothing beyond its prohibited ramparts. The NSA provides training for its linguists in ninety-five different languages, plus every possible dialect of Arabic, including Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, and Modern Standard Arabic. In this world it is virtually impossible to communicate across borders from one military operation to another without being heard, with immense clarity and understanding, by the electronic interceptors at Fort Meade.

The vast compound covers 325 acres, with thirty-two miles of roads. There are more than 37,000 cars registered in Crypto City. Its own private Post Office delivers 70,000 pieces of a mail per day. Its annual budget runs into billions of dollars, making it probably the largest municipality in the state of Maryland. Crypto City has never appeared as a city on any map.

The NSA, with seven hundred active armed cops, has a twenty-four-hour command, control, and communications center. Under any kind of threat, it activates immediately a machine-gun-toting Emergency Reaction Team to “battle stations” covering all gates. A million-to-one fluke might allow an intruder inside the compound, but the chances of such a person ever being seen or heard from again are remote.

The Executive Protection Unit mounts a twenty-four-hour armed bodyguard on the NSA’s Director. And up on the eighth floor of the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS-2B Building,
Admiral George R. Morris was still at his desk when the Duty Officer from the Military Intelligence Division, Army Captain Scott Wade, nodding cheerfully to the two policemen on duty outside the door, tapped softly and let himself in.

“’Evening, sir,” he said. “We just got a communication in from Langley. About that British SAS Officer gone missing in Israel. I thought you might want to see it right away.”

The two men were very familiar to each other, and the Admiral looked up from his desk. “Hello, Scotty,” he said. “Did they find him?”

“No, sir. No, they did not. And there’s been no hostage demand. They seem to have written that off as a possibility.”

“Hmmmmm,” replied Admiral Morris, reading the
Daily Mail
’s account with interest. “They sure as hell didn’t find him. Jesus Christ! The guy’s a Muslim.”

“Well, at least he used to be, sir. I’m not sure about that changing-religions bullshit. I always thought once a Muslim always a Muslim.”

“I guess that was the intention of the Prophet, Scotty,” said the Admiral, smiling. “But lemme ask you something. You spend most of your life looking at situations like this. And I guess we’ve suspected Major Kerman may have gone over to the other side, even if the Brits have confirmed nothing. But have you seen any evidence, or any signs at all, in the hundreds of pages of reports, that Major Kerman has defected to some Islamic Fundamentalist group?”

“Not really, sir. And no one’s ever actually
said
he did. At least not for sure. It’s only been speculation.”

“Yeah. I know. But just take a look at the treatment this big national newspaper in London has given this story. It’s cross-referenced on the front page, and inside they run this damn great tabloid spread, big headlines, pictures of Ray Kerman at school in Harrow, pictures of his parents, pictures of this Iranian dust hole he was born in. Christ, they got about five guys covering this.

“I’m telling you, Scotty, someone over in England thinks this really matters. Not someone on the newspaper, they’re just guessing, hoping to be right. But someone in Whitehall has alerted them. The Defence Ministry was concerned enough to quietly tip them off.

“Jesus, look at this coverage. There’s a clear implication this Kerman character gunned down two of his colleagues, SAS NCOs. Professionals. That makes him very dangerous indeed.”

“I agree with you, sir. I just wonder what group could have recruited him. I mean, this story implies he was in line possibly to command the entire SAS. Everyone thought so highly of him, and he had no money worries. Looks like his dad was going to give him a dozen oceangoing freighters when he finished with the Army.”

“People do some goddamned weird things, Scotty,” replied the Admiral thoughtfully. “Goddamned weird things.”

George Morris was a deceptive character, a big man, with a kind of lugubrious manner, deliberately slow in his responses, deliberately ponderous in his thinking, but rock steady in his judgments, and wryly amused at his ability to convey the impression he was a bit slow-witted.

Vice Admiral George Morris was in fact lightning-witted. A former Commanding Officer of the massive
John C. Stennis
Carrier Battle Group (CVBG), he had ruled his flotilla of twelve warships, eighty-four fighter-bomber aircraft, and thousands of men with a quiet certainty that was admired throughout the U.S. Navy. No one gets to command a modern CVBG without an intellect hovering close to genius level.

At the conclusion of his seagoing days he had been handpicked by the Big Man himself to move into the NSA. Then, one year ago, Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan had announced that George Morris would succeed him as Director, when Arnold Morgan moved to the White House.

Most new National Security Advisers to the President
recommended
things. Arnold Morgan did not recommend. He ordered. And when he ordered, people jumped. Sometimes on all five continents.

Admiral Morris sat comfortably in the Big Chair in Fort Meade, and everyone knew he was in it for as long as he wanted to be. Except, of course, when the Big Man from the White House came visiting and automatically walked straight in and sat right down at his old desk. It was as if Arnold Morgan considered he held both top jobs in National Security, rather than just the one at the right hand of the President.

“Scotty,” said Admiral Morris. “This is a goddamned interesting piece of journalism. Full of facts. And some of ’em may even be true.”

“Yes. I thought so, sir.”

“But I think enough of this is obviously true for us to make a pretty simple worst-case judgment.”

“Sir?”

“I think we got a fucking tiger out there. And he’s not on our side. This Kerman bastard has gone over the wall. No doubt in my mind.”