First Team (24 page)

It was 6:05 P.M.; she’d missed lunch and dinner. Corrine got up from the desk, remembering that there was a package of Fig Newtons in her pocketbook, which because of security requirements she wasn’t allowed to bring into the reference area. She also wasn’t allowed to wear her shoes—instead, she had a pair of ill-fitting cardboard slippers that made her feel as if he she were a patient at a hospital with a library.

That’s what they called it, with a little sign on the door. They even had a little old lady with bluish hair to help you.

As counsel to the congressional Intelligence Committee, Corrine had been briefed on a number of clandestine operations, including two or three that featured cooperation between Special Forces and the CIA. The history of such operations extended to the Kennedy presidency; while they had been severely curtailed in the wake of the Vietnam War, they had gradually come back into favor and in fact enjoyed some success in Afghanistan during the war on terror. But the Joint Services Special Demands Project Office and “the Team” were unique in several ways:

1.
     
Missions were authorized and conducted without any paperwork whatsoever— no findings, no bureaucratic review, no audit, no log, no mention anywhere in the extensive operations files. Whereas a typical—if there were such a thing—CIA mission would stem from an NSC finding, Special Demands specifically didn’t need such findings, and in fact none were in the records, which meant there had been none. Nor were there any records of direct executive orders from the president authorizing specific Special Demands programs or missions.

2.
     
Missions were not authorized or reviewed at any level below or above DDO; there was apparently no way for anyone outside of the extremely small group of people involved even to know about them.

3.
     
The Team apparently combined collection and paramilitary functions—it collected intelligence, then immediately acted on it. While this, of course, had happened throughout the CIA’s history, and in fact started during the OSS days, the line here seemed deliberately fused, with the same mission gathering intelligence, then immediately acting on it.

4.
     
In Corrine’s experience, backed up by her review of the Agency’s records, most operations involving cooperation between the military and the Agency’s clandestine service were of relatively limited duration, ending when a specific goal was achieved. From what she had seen, the Joint Services Special Demands Project Office and its missions weren’t tied to specific operations. In this way, the model seemed to be the information side of the Agency, which provided intelligence to the military services on an ongoing basis. Not only could the goals change mid-mission—as they apparently had here—but the unit existed forever.

5.
     
There were no apparent audit controls, and in fact Special Demands seemed to have an almost unlimited budget, with access not only to the extensive resources of a specially created Army Special Forces Group, but a variety of other service assets as well. The man in charge of the military end of the operation—Colonel Van Buren—answered
not
to USSOCOM, but to the head of Special Demands. Unlike other Special Forces groups, his core unit was not assigned a specific geographical area. It appeared to consist of only one battalion—smaller than the normal three combat battalions and nearly another’s worth of support people— but even that wasn’t clear from the documents Corrine had reviewed. While there were some military constraints on him—for example, he had to draw his men from SF units—from what Corrine could gather he existed entirely in a bubble, with no interference—or guidance—from higher-ups.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about the Kiro or current mission in the Agency’s own secret files.

Which spoke volumes, in Corrine’s opinion. The president’s characterization of the unit as “cowboys” brushed the tip of the iceberg.

This was exactly the sort of situation that had led to CIA assassin teams and unchecked, unlawful, and ultimately self-defeating operations in the 1960s. In some ways, the present situation was even worse—not only had technology improved tremendously in the past forty years, but the capabilities of the SF unit was far beyond anything available during the Vietnam War.

If she was reading what she’d heard and seen at the meeting correctly, Special Demands short-circuited the normal CIA chain of command, with the field officer actually running the show. Ferguson was too young to have extensive experience, and the DDO was clearly overwhelmed with his other responsibilities to pay too much attention. The SF colonel seemed to have decent sense, but he was more Ferguson’s equal than his boss. Corrigan was just a staff lackey, treated as such.

Not only did this stripped-down structure invite abuse, it encouraged mistakes. The Iranian ship was an international incident waiting to happen.

It was also a mistaken lead. Granted, it was logical; the prisoner had a clear connection to the group thought to have purchased the ship, and there were satellite photos and other data showing that trains did follow a path that would make diversion possible. But the Iranian government had infiltrated the local branch of the Islamic group two months before, and there was no sign at all of their involvement. The ship wasn’t guarded by Iranian police or troops, and the funding conduits they normally used for “overseas education” did not include anything related to the ship.

And if the May 10 message was correct, the ship couldn’t be the delivery vessel; it wouldn’t even be ready to sail by then. Admittedly, the message seemed like a red herring; it did no more than predict “disaster for Satan’s paradise.” Except that the language was similar to what Allah’s Fist had once used, it would seem no different than any dozen predictions the NSA and CIA routinely collected and dismissed.

Corrine had also taken the time to bone up on radiation hazards. The issue was extremely complicated—considerably more tangled than Corrigan’s slides had shown. High-alpha waste such as the material believed stolen in transit was extremely dangerous, but only if pulverized and inhaled. That was why Corrigan had mentioned the need for explosives—the waste would have to be spread into the air by a large explosion. Gamma generators, by contrast, were not quite as dire. But they, too, had an effect, usually over time. Overall, the exact health hazard was difficult to estimate, even after exposure, except under very controlled conditions, when the exposure was recorded with the help of a film device worn on the body. A single gray—a dose equal to one joule of energy absorbed by one kilogram—would cause radiation sickness, which meant nausea, vomiting, and dizziness; that level of exposure could lead to death in a few days—or not at all. Much lower doses might not make a person sick immediately, but could cause or perhaps encourage cancer—the exact mechanism wasn’t fully understood.

Part of the difficulty in assessing the risk came from the fact that data had to be collected sporadically, largely from accidents and errors. Corrine had read reports on three accidental nuclear-waste releases during the Cold War at the Soviet Union’s Chlyabinsk-65 plant. Stripping Soviet propaganda and correlating exposure levels, one of the studies found that 95 percent of the cleanup team at a tank explosion had been exposed to cancer-causing levels of gamma radiation in less than a day. That would be consistent with the effects of an explosion of a tractor trailer’s worth of strontium-90, the material mentioned in Corrigan’s report. In a less dire accident ten years later, 41,500 people at Lake Karachay were “minimally” and “briefly” exposed to cesium-137 and strontium-90 when the radioactive dust was swept up during a wind storm. According to the study, 4,800 received doses above 1.3 centisieverts, enough to increase cancer risks significantly.

Leukemia, birth defects, lung cancer, stillbirths, sterility—the effects of even a mild exposure measured in curies, perhaps from a few hundred pounds of high-level waste, were definite yet unpredictable, a macabre lottery of death and illness, impossible to predict.

That was the point. You couldn’t know exactly how bad it would be, and so you would fear the worst. You would be paralyzed by the ambiguity, terrorized by the possibility of death.

Dirty death.

The threat was real. But it was besides the point. She hadn’t been sent to assess it, just check on the Team.

In Corrine’s opinion, the only sensible thing to do was to abolish Special Demands. Her case depended largely on this one operation, since it was the only one she knew of. Nonetheless, it made for a good set of exhibits for the prosecution.

“So, Counselor, did you find anything interesting?”

Corrine looked up, surprised to see Daniel Slott, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, standing near the door as she retrieved her things from the locker outside the library.

“Always,” she said.

Slott scratched the thick five o’clock shadow on his cheek. “Have you had dinner?” he asked.

“Thank you, I’m not hungry,” said Corrine, pointedly glancing at Slott’s wedding ring.

“I’m not trying to pick you up,” he said. “Just, if you need background, I can supply it.”

“I don’t know that it’s necessary, thank you.”

“Is there a problem I ought to know about?” said Slott.

“You tell me,” said Corrine.

“I don’t think there’s a problem at all.”

“One thing that wasn’t clear to me,” she said, deciding to do a discovery interview before presenting her brief. “What exactly is the oversight procedure on Joint Services Special Demands Project Office?”

“Usually we refer to it simply as the Team.”

“Yes?”

“I review everything.”

“How is it that there are no specific findings prior to a mission?”

“Not necessary,” he said. “As a matter of fact, the NSC specifically stated that Special Demands is under the direct supervision of an individual appointed by the president, which has been, is, me.”

“The streamlined procedure was designed because it wasn’t intended to authorize this sort of operation,” she said. “Special Demands was intended to be used to develop weapons and other devices that might have applications for your agency and the Special Forces units. Wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t limited,” said Slott.

Corrine, who had studied the NSC minutes and knew that was the only matter discussed, zipped her pocketbook and started toward the door. Slott followed.

“Listen, we’ve got an important operation running here—it’s proof the system works,” he said.

Corrine didn’t bother answering.

“It’s not like I can go out and start World War III,” added Slott.

“Mr. Ferguson can,” said Corrine. “There are no holds on him.”

“Of course there are.”

“Name one.”

“Me. Van Buren. The people in the field.”

Corrine remained unimpressed.

“Ferguson is one of our best people. I trust him completely.”

Slott reached out and grabbed her arm. She jerked back, adrenaline rising; she’d flatten him if she had to.

“We shouldn’t be enemies here,” Slott said, letting go. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re not enemies, that I know of,” she told him, walking away.

~ * ~

9

BANDAR ‘ABBÃS, IRAN

The tracks leading to two of the three railroad yards Ferg wanted to look at were ripped up and missing in spots, and when the radiation detector didn’t pick up any readings nearby, Ferg decided not to bother with them. The third was located about thirty-five miles northeast of Bandar ‘Abbas, in a town that wouldn’t have seemed terribly out of place in middle America—once you adjusted for the veils, beards, and minarets.