KBL (6 page)

Dick Holbrooke had no idea what was going on in Abbottabad because, as one of Washington’s most sieve-like leakers, he of all people wasn’t cleared to know. Which is why Vince called him and told him in hushed tones, “This is for your ears only, Dick, please! I can assure you that so far as CIA is concerned, the CNN story is pure horse puckey. It’s wishful thinking. Irresponsible fiction. NATO’s got its head up its ass.”

That confidential whisper was passed on to Holbrooke’s press corps favorites within minutes. On background, of course.

Vince laughed out loud when he’d read his precise words—the printable ones, unattributed—in the next day’s papers.

These were dicey times, when the Justice Department was crawling all over CIA looking to prosecute someone, anyone because of those so-called enhanced interrogation methods. And congressional intelligence oversight committees were demanding that CIA never lie, cheat, steal, or do anything that Boy Scouts wouldn’t do. Which is why Vince’s staff had to be goddamn contortionists to come up with on-the-record answers that were misleading enough to put the story to sleep, but not come back and bite CIA on its well-scarred ass when the truth about Abbottabad finally came out.

Vince focused on Charlie Becker’s cable. Five teams of Paki gumshoes and one Guantánamo knucklehead—a very dangerous Guantánamo knucklehead, to boot—working a city of thirty-five thousand. Shit.

“Obviously, the Pakistanis are worried, right?” He shook the sheet of paper at the National Clandestine Service’s top spook. “Stu, whatta you think?”

Stuart Kapos had twenty-eight years under his belt as an officer in CIA’s clandestine service. Now he ran it. A big man who’d played football at the Naval Academy, he still ran marathons at age fifty-five. Kapos, who was known Agency-wide as a no-shit guy, sipped his coffee, placed the mug on the glass top of the director’s desk, and leaned back in the armchair that faced Mercaldi. “I think what you think, Boss. The Paks are worried that we’re doing something.” He smiled. “And y’know, they’re right.”

“We have no proof UBL’s in Abbottabad.”

“Not yet.”

“And we’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars to this operation so far—with no real evidence that he’s there.”

“You know who they used to quote at the Academy? John Paul Jones: ‘He who will not risk cannot win.’ ”

“Easy for you to say,” the D/CIA said. “You’re covert. I’m the one who’s gonna get his ass handed to him in public if I have to tell Congress we’ve flushed a shitload of the people’s money down the toilet.”

“That’s why you got the big car and all those bodyguards.” Kapos scratched his shaved head. “I spoke with Dick Hallett and Spike before I came up here. Let me give you BLG’s take on Charlie’s cable. They say, Okay, let’s say the Paks know—or at least a few of them know—UBL actually
is
in the Khan brothers’ compound in Abbottabad. So, the Paks think, what if those stupid Americans might have listened to that NATO guy, and now they’re starting to wonder if UBL isn’t hiding out in some cave in Waziristan, but living large in Pakistan. And what if the Great Satan is sending the dreaded CIA onto our sovereign soil to check the NATO story out. And what if the Great Satan has spies in Abbottabad, where we know UBL is stashed, and they actually find him. Then we Pakistanis are fucked. Because we’ve lied to our biggest cash cow.”

“Hmmm. And?”

“And so Spike’s analysts believe the Paks—or at least those Paks protecting UBL—are sending a full-court press of ISI co-conspirators to Abbottabad to make sure we’re specifically not operating there.”

The director scratched his ear.

Kapos continued: “Because they’re sure as hell not pulling a full-court press anywhere else. Not Lahore, not Peshawar, not Islamabad or Karachi or Rawalpindi. Nowhere but Abbottabad.

“Spike takes this full-court press as a very positive sign. Because you know and I know that when we lay our hands on UBL—and we will—and he’s been living in a city where all the top generals and intelligence pashas retire? UBL surrounded by the cream of Pakistan’s military and intelligence crop? And if we kill him right under their noses? They’ll do more than shit a few bricks. They’ll shit Yankee fucking Stadium.”

“Hmmm.” The director sat silently for half a minute, contemplating the ceiling. Then he said, “Okay, Stu, let’s say you’re right. UBL’s in Abbottabad. So, what do we do to keep the Paks at bay?”

Kapos shrugged and pointed to the coffee cup he had set down on the director’s desk. “Follow the instructions on my mug.”

Vince turned the mug until he could read what was printed on it: “A
DMIT
NOTHING
. D
ENY
EVERYTHING
. F
ILE
COUNTERCHARGES
.” He laughed. “That’s it?”

“Well, in a nutshell, yes.”

“Funny, Stu. Very funny.” The director’s expression turned serious. “Look, if BLG is right, then we have to distract them. Draw their attention away from Abbottabad. From Valhalla. Divert their focus.”

“Exactly,” Kapos’s head nodded in agreement. “Remember Sun Tzu.”

Vince’s brow furrowed. “Sun Tzu?”

“He wrote, ‘All warfare is deception.’ ” The operations officer sipped his coffee. “Today’s Pearl Harbor Day. Remember how the Japanese kept Roosevelt busy negotiating smoke and mirrors while Isoroku Yamamoto’s fleet was steaming east to Hawaii? We need to expose the Pakis to some of the same kind of three-card Monte smoke and mirrors.”

Vince laid Charlie’s cable on his desk facedown and moved his hands back and forth across the glass as if he were shifting folded playing cards. “Keep your eyes on the ace and win twenty bucks.”

“Which you never win. Exactly.”

The D/CIA stared at his deputy. “And I bet you already have a deception operation in mind.”

Stu Kapos hooked a thumb in his red-white-and-blue suspenders and Cheshire-cat smiled at his boss. “You got another ten minutes for me?”

“I’ve got all day if you need it.”

“Ten minutes. It’s so KISS.” Kapos caught the quizzical look on the D/CIA’s face. “KISS—Keep it simple, stupid.” He grinned “You’ll love it.”

“Do we have to brief the Hill?”

Kapos shook his head. “Nope, players are already all in place. I’ll use two teams from our Whiskey Trio targeting program. Whiskey Trio is run out of Special Activities Division. Congress was already briefed. So BLG can keep on keepin’ on.”

That made Vince happy. No congressional briefings meant no leaks. The D/CIA put both elbows on his desk and interlaced his fingers. “Talk away, Boychik.”

4

Cumberland Parkway, Virginia Beach, Virginia
December 9, 2010, 0510 Hours Local Time

Boatswain’s Mate Second Class (SEAL) Troy Roberts, BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS) Class 237, finished the eight minutes of stretching he did every morning so he wouldn’t cramp up as he ran his eight miles. This morning’s course would take him west, around Lake Trashmore, then south and east, where he ran the perimeter of the Bow Creek Country Club. Other days meant other routes. It was part of Roberts’s normal operational security pattern.

Op-sec was central to Troy’s lifestyle—and his family’s as well. Whenever she was asked, his wife, Brittany, would tell people that Troy worked as part of a Navy logistics team that supported the SEAL teams, even though she knew it was a lie. She lied because her husband was a Navy SEAL whose missions, like the actual name of his unit, were classified top secret.

The ability to maintain this bifurcated existence had been part of the selection process. Troy had undergone a battery of psychological tests to ensure that he was not a sociopath nor had any other personality disorder. The results also showed him to be the one in several hundreds of thousands of individuals who could kill efficiently, brutally, in any number of ways, then turn the switch and go home to be a loving father and husband. In other words, he was the ideal special warfare operator.

That was good, because the ultimate cost of his constant training would run into the low seven figures. He could pick locks, hotwire cars, work ciphers, jump out of perfectly good aircraft, and launch a minisub off the deck of a submerged nuclear boomer. During his short tenure in his current unit, the baby-faced youngster had killed more than two dozen individuals. Not at a distance, either, but up close and personal. And yet unlike the SEALs at Little Creek Amphibious Base, where SEAL Teams Two, Four, Eight, and Ten had their quarterdecks, Troy seldom wore the eagle, flintlock pistol, and trident device, ubiquitously known to SEALs as the Budweiser, in public.

That was because except on rare occasions, or when he was deployed overseas, Troy didn’t wear a uniform. He went to work in civvies, jeans mostly, and long overshirts that concealed the Glock 26 in its well-used Kydex and horsehide Crossbreed holster and the Emerson LaGriffe last-ditch knife that hung on a chain around his neck, both of which he carried even when he took his daily runs. Only when he had passed through the single-lane checkpoint that led to the Dam Neck Fleet Training Center, a twelve-minute commute from his home, would he sometimes change into some of the clothing and use some of the equipment the military had issued him.

There was a lot of it, too. What the American taxpayer had bought for the twenty-four-year-old, dark-haired Minnesotan whose radio call sign was T-Rob filled a standard twenty-foot dry freight container. That is, a steel box nineteen feet ten inches in length, eight feet six inches high, and eight feet wide. Filled it almost to overflowing.

That container, and dozens more just like it, each containing the equipment of a single SEAL, sat in a warehouse-like structure just east of Regulus Avenue and just north of Lake Tecumseh, at the northernmost edge of the sprawling Dam Neck campus that was the headquarters for Roberts’s unit, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly referred to as DEVGRU.

DEVGRU was the current unclassified designator for the unit formerly known as SEAL Team Six. ST6 had been established in the wake of the disastrous hostage rescue attempt by Delta Force that ended with the debacle at Desert One on April 25, 1980, which cost the lives of eight American servicemen and the United States of America immeasurable loss of stature and prestige among both allies and adversaries. By late October of that year, ST6’s first CO, Commander Richard Marcinko, had hand-selected the unit’s initial seventy-two SEALs—Plankowners, in Navy parlance—plucking them from SEAL Team One in Coronado, California, and SEAL Team Two, based in Little Creek, Virginia.

Marcinko trained SEAL Team Six hard. The newly minted counterterrorists shot thousands of rounds of ammunition; perfected jumping out of planes at thirty-thousand-plus feet; endlessly practiced boarding cruise ships, tankers, and container vessels under way using flexible caving ladders and pure brute upper-body strength; honed assault tactics on everything from oil platforms to passenger jets to railroad trains. They deployed from submarines and commercial aircraft. They cross-trained with our allies’ best counterterror units: Britain’s Special Air Service and the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron, Germany’s GSG-9, and Israel’s Sayeret Matkal.

But by the mid-1980s, ST6 had come under a cloud. Despite the undeniable fact that Six’s shooters were among the most capable in the world, unit discipline was known to be lax. Excessive drinking was commonplace, and fiscal restraint was acknowledged to be virtually nonexistent.