The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (23 page)

Along the western coast of India, on the Arabian Sea, lies the bustling State of Gujarat, a province that is slightly smaller than South Dakota and a tad bigger than the State of Washington. It is home to some 70 million closely-packed human beings. Gujarat is the most industrialized and economically vibrant of India’s 28 major provinces. It fairly hums with the sound of commerce.

The ancient port of Surat occupies about five square miles of land forming a nearly circular oxbow in the Tapti River in southern Gujarat, a dozen miles inland from the ocean. To avoid road and rail bridges that cross the Tapti, modern port facilities serving Surat were built in 1960 five miles downstream from the city proper.

This is the sparkling new Port of Magdalla, connected by State Highway 66 to the urban center. A deepwater anchorage for larger vessels is further downstream still at the mouth of the Tapti where it joins the Arabian Sea in the steaming Gulf of Cambey.

Brigadier Mahmood and Kate Langley flew from a Karachi military airfield to Surat Airport, less than a quarter mile from the Port of Magdalla, in an inconspicuous and unmarked 15-passenger Beechcraft-99 turboprop helpfully provided by the ISI commander in Karachi. Both were wearing unmarked civilian khakis. Brigadier Singh met them on the tarmac, far from the airport tower and hangar.

“You see before you Miss Langley the advantages of respect for military authority in India,” Brigadier Singh said. He was a lean, handsome man in his mid-fifties whose uniform included the mandatory Sikh turban, or
dastar
. “We can whisk even a Pakistani general and his American guest through the Indian frontier without a whisper of gossip. Do you think you could do that in your country?”

Brigadier Mahmood laughed and embraced his Indian colleague.

“You’d be surprised at how skillful we have become at evading unwanted media, General,” Kate said, shaking hands with Singh. “We get lots of practice. By the way, my boss Mort Feldman wanted me especially to say ‘thank you’ for the help you are according us.”

“You are most welcome, I assure you. And I should say also, Mahmood, that we are the primary beneficiaries of this operation. We don’t want these chaps moving arms, or worse, around in ships and lorries any more than you do.”

Brigadier Singh motioned toward his Jeep. On the short ride to the port, he explained that he had alerted the local authorities about the possibility of a smuggling incident, and of the Army’s requirement that a particular 40-foot container be isolated. His orders had been carried out with dispatch, he told his guests, and so far without arousing any unwanted curiosity on the part of the locals.

At the entry guard post, the Jeep’s driver stopped to show authorization to enter the fenced-off port facility. The guard pointed silently to a television truck parked to one side by an administration building.

“I may have spoken too soon,” General Singh said. “I see we have visitors with cameras.”

“Surely they need permission to go beyond the gate?” Mahmood asked.

“They do. But if there is something untoward in that container, it is going to be very difficult to keep a lid on it.”

“We must limit access, and we must develop a plausible cover story,” Mahmood offered.

The Jeep drove from the facility perimeter to the wharf and jetty on the banks of the Tapti. The sky was overcast. The dark brown waters of the estuary smelled heavily of bunker fuel. Brigadier Singh explained that the suspect container had been identified through its ISO-BIC identification plaque. The port was equipped with robotic carts with cameras that automatically scanned ID plates throughout the yard, constantly updating the inventory of containers and their locations on a computerized map. As they exited the Jeep, Singh asked an adjutant to shoo away onlookers.

“The port people tell me they lose a dozen containers a day just within this yard,” Brigadier Singh said. “They mostly turn up again on their own just through the magic of the automated inventory system. Those carts buzz about on their own, constantly updating the database. Your container was spotted the minute it arrived by truck from the Jageshwar Shipyard. I instructed the port people to isolate it in an empty warehouse pending my arrival.”

As they crossed the tarmac on foot to the warehouse, Kate looked toward the perimeter fencing, half expecting to see a crowd of reporters chasing them. She had seen it too often on American TV: the military officer or government official walking calmly in the frame of the picture when a reporter and television crew ambushes him. Then, guilty or not, the victim shields his face, looks flustered, and starts stammering—the proverbial ‘deer in the headlights.’ Even the innocent looked guilty under such conditions. But of course this was India, not America. They didn’t give the press quite that much latitude here.

“We do not have at Magdalla the sophisticated radiation detectors you have in Karachi,” Singh said. “Those units cost $800,000 each and we can supply them only to our biggest facilities. This is merely one of our medium ports. However, we did scan the exterior of the container repeatedly with sensitive Geiger counters.”

“And did you get a signal?” Kate asked.

“None at all,” Singh said. “There is no radiation emanating from that container.”

***

The intermodal unit was on wooden pallets in the center of an empty warehouse under cone lamps hanging from the rafters. Made of heavy, corrugated steel, it was painted a bright Post Office red, with sealed doors fitted at one end. Each end was eight feet square, and the unit itself was forty feet long with 2,500 cubic feet of internal space—a standard 40-footer. It appeared almost inviting under the bright lights, the bright red giving it a cheery look.

“Wait a second,” Kate said. “This unit is a ‘reefer.’ This can’t be right.”

Both Singh and Mahmood looked at her with puzzled expressions.

“This is a refrigerated intermodal unit,” Kate said, “a reefer in the lingo of shipping.”

“How can you tell?” Mahmood asked.

“Those vents on both ends,” she said. “They allow the coolant gas to escape.”

“I thought refrigerated containers required electrical power,” Mahmood said, “to run a fridge unit inside.”

“Some do. There are several kinds,” Kate replied. “The long-term units are essentially mobile refrigerators and need a power supply to run an internal compressor, just like a refrigerator. This one here is called a ‘total loss refrigeration’ unit and uses frozen carbon dioxide, common dry ice, to provide the coolant. As the dry ice evaporates into gas, it is vented through the valves you see beneath those grills on the corners. It maintains cooling until all the frozen gas evaporates, anywhere from seven to 21 days, maximum, depending on how it’s set up.”

“Why would you need cooling to ship a tactical nuclear weapon?” Brigadier Singh asked.

“You wouldn’t,” Kate said. “This must be the wrong container.”

“But I’m certain it isn’t,” Singh said with irritation. “This is the container shipped by Security Exports to Jakarta, offloaded at Jageshwar three days ago.”

They inspected the exterior of the container and checked again the correspondence of the ISO-BIC identification code on the BIC computer system. It was indeed the container that had been flagged in Karachi.

“I would like to open this,” Brigadier Mahmood said, “but I must presume that it is booby-trapped in some way. We can’t just break the seal and pull open the doors.”

“It should be possible to drill a small hole in the metal wall,” a technician offered, “at a spot we can determine is flat, on the side of the box, and then insert a fiber optic probe.”

“That would tell us,” Kate responded, “if anything, a wire for example, is attached to the door from the inside.”

Brigadier Singh instructed a group of technicians to drill a small test hole at roughly eye level in the side of the intermodal container, about three feet from the end with the doors. This small hole was then enlarged to about one inch in diameter, through which a light source and tiny camera was slipped through. Kate could feel cool air emerge from the hole, indicating that the coolant material inside, whatever it was, had not yet exhausted itself.

An image was displayed on a monitor on a moveable cart next to the box. The grainy picture displayed a largely empty intermodal container holding a box made of wooden planks strapped to the walls and floor with heavy canvas belts. It was about seven feet square and three feet deep, about the size necessary to hold a grand piano without the legs attached.

“I don’t see any wire or attachments to the interior of the doors,” Mahmood said. “I say we open it and find out what we’re dealing with. No booby traps.”

Brigadier Singh nodded and motioned the technicians toward the doors. One broke the seal with a pair of wire cutters. Two others manipulated the vertical bar controlling the latches at the top and bottom of the doors. The techs pulled on the two heavy steel gates, which screeched loudly as they swung back in their hinges. A wave of frigid air gently wafted out of the container, pooling at their feet.

***

The two male bodies inside the wooden crate were perfectly preserved, their rigid gray faces wreathed in a fine dusting of frost, like powdered sugar. A coroner hastily called to the scene estimated that they had been dead five to seven days. The cold packing inside the insulated intermodal unit had prevented decomposition. Identification was easy, as both dead men were fully dressed and carried passports, credit cards, and the other pocket litter one would expect to find in the clothing of seasoned international travelers.

The younger of the two men was a man named Jacques LeClerc, erstwhile black market arms dealer. The older man was a retired Russian colonel, Viktor Marchenko, a known business associate of LeClerc. No weapons were found in the container. Like the Uzbek driver found in Karachi, both men had been swiftly strangled with wire ligatures.

“Whoever did this is toying with you, I fear,” said Brigadier Singh. “You were intended to find this container and these bodies.”

“But not a bomb,” Mahmood said.

“If, indeed, there is a bomb,” Singh said skeptically.

“No one would go to all this trouble merely as a prank,” Mahmood objected. “This was part of a larger design, a plan to throw us off the scent long enough for the armed container to slip our grasp.”

“So we’re back to chasing the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
?” Kate asked.

“Perhaps,” Mahmood observed. “Or some other vessel. This has caused us a potentially disastrous loss of time. We now have to go back and try to reconstruct the movements of LeClerc and his Russian friend here from the time they arrived in Karachi.”

“My money would be on your ship bound for Jakarta,” said Singh. “Why else would your adversary go to so much trouble to lead you astray with these bodies? He wanted to keep you off that ship. This container was left deliberately at the Jageshwar Shipyard as a decoy.”

“And perhaps as a grim joke,” Kate said. “For starters, I would request that this pair be shipped to Quantico right away, along with the dust, dirt, wooden crate and everything else we find in this container. If it weren’t so heavy, I’d like to take the container itself, but is probably not necessary.  There may be something here that we can use forensically.”

“As you wish,” Singh said. “I have authorization to cooperate in every way possible with CIA and ISI. This is your operation. You can take formal possession of these bodies. We will tell the local authorities to stand down in the name of national security. These unfortunates were not murdered on Indian soil in any case.”

“And what shall we tell the press?” Mahmood asked.

“Why, I will tell them nothing at all,” Singh said nonchalantly. “This isn’t America. And there is nothing to report.”

Yasser al-Greeb stood on the bridge of the small freighter he now owned outright, purchased at a cost of two million dollars. The outlay for the ship was about twenty per cent of the total budget he had made for acquiring and delivering the nuclear device he was carrying in the ship’s hold.

Al-Greeb was wearing Western clothes—trousers of waterproof nylon and canvas, a sailing vest and a foul-weather jacket to keep out the stiff breeze, and a Navy-blue wool cap. Though he was most comfortable in hot, dry weather and found the sea breeze oppressively damp and chill, he was content. But for the dark hollows above his cheekbones, which gave his face a haunted look, he might have been an Arab princeling out for a jaunt on his yacht in the Riviera on a nippy day.

For the first time in weeks, Al-Greeb felt a sense of security. He had time to reflect now. It was astonishing to him that buying a cargo freighter had been so easy, especially since Al Qaeda had purchased its first ship in 1994 and used a cargo vessel to deliver explosives to blow up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The market was still completely unregulated.

Hundreds of similar vessels were listed for sale every day on the Internet. Had Western government authorities no clue as to how powerful a weapon of war a cargo freighter was? Well, perhaps he would have to teach them again. Most men were guided by a sense of hope. Al-Greeb felt that hope, though sometimes a comfort, was a poor guide to meaningful activity. He preferred to be steered by mental rigor, forcing himself to think of every possible obstacle that could block his objectives and how he might overcome each one.

After leaving the three intermodal cargo containers, including the refrigerated container holding the frozen corpses of Jacques LeClerc and Colonel Marchenko, at Jageshwar Shipyard, Al-Greeb had ordered the captain, a man named Adnan, a Lebanese, to sail toward the Gulf of Aden. This was five days journey at the
Nippon Yoku-Maru’s
cruising speed of 15 knots. Al-Greeb hoped he had sowed behind him enough confusion to buy him those five days of unmolested travel. In a week, Yasser al-Greeb would make his ship disappear.

Jacques LeClerc, Viktor Marchenko, Simon Wantree, even the traitorous Uzbek taxi driver Uktam Hakim, whom he had briefly trusted, could no longer thwart him. They slept in silence now, keeping Al-Greeb’s secrets for eternity. Only Zabet, the Pashtun driver, still lived, and he was with him aboard ship. He could handle Zabet.

The seas were choppy, the day was overcast and windy. The shipping lanes in ‘Pirate Alley,’ the name by which the Gulf of Aden was known to sailors in recent years because of the pirate activity of Somali warlords who hoped to hold rich oil tankers up for ransom, were always crowded. Some thousands of vessels larger than the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
took the Suez Canal route through the Gulf of Aden every year, and countless thousands more of smaller ships, including the Arab sailing dhows that had plied these waters for millennia.

Using binoculars, Al-Greeb could see four large ships, three on the horizon ahead of the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
, a third travelling in the opposite direction, already behind them heading toward Asia. He had no fear of pirates. His ship was simply too small and too obviously poor to merit an attack.

Captain Adnan had reported to him earlier in the day that the only unusual event occurring in the waters ahead of them was the astonishing appearance off the western coast of Yemen of an underwater volcanic eruption. According to marine reports, fisherman had witnessed lava fountains reaching 90 feet above the sea, and within days they had noted what appeared to be a new island among a group known as the Zubair. These tiny islands poked above the Red Sea, rising from a shield volcano beneath Yemeni waters. The region was part of the Red Sea Rift, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart, creating new sea floor and planetary crust. As they approached Aden, they might even see for themselves columns of steam rising into the stratosphere. It was an event to be relished.

These facts of geology made Al-Greeb intensely curious. They were prophetic of his own work, he believed. It pleased him that the very earth was being created anew in these parts, just as he was creating anew the social and political structures that supported human culture. The steam, molten rock, and explosive eruptions told of creation of new land. The very different explosion he personally was to bring about, with its fire, winds, and hellish destruction, told of creation of another kind.

The fire and cataclysm of the new island off Yemen was a portent. Al-Greeb did not believe in coincidences. The event he was planning was of the sort by which human history would be divided, a watershed event. Before Christ, BC. Anno Domini, AD. Before Al-Greeb. After Al-Greeb. The explosion would mark the beginning of the New Caliphate and the end of the period of corruption and stagnation, the era of Christians and Jews.

Who else had felt as he now felt? Columbus discovering a New World? Mohammed founding a new religion? His exhilaration was unbounded, his optimism unchecked, his hope for the future expansive.

***

On the sixth day out from the western coast of India, Al-Greeb directed Captain Adnan to change course very slightly to sail for Djibouti in the Gulf of Tadjoura, separated only by 137 nautical miles from Aden yet on a different continent entirely, the continent of Africa.

Adnan protested that they were expected in Aden, but he dared not argue with the look Al-Greeb gave him. Adnan was not a true believer. He was in it for the money, and he could not contradict those cold, black eyes, eyes so dark that one could not distinguish pupil from iris. They were bottomless pits, the impassive eyes of a shark. With such a person, one did not protest.

When the coast of Africa came into sight, Al-Greeb returned to the bridge. The wind was blowing. Dancing spires of ochre dust twirled out over the water from the stony desert plateaus of the Horn of Africa. The freighter rounded the spit of land that marked the old
ville de Djibouti
and headed into the calm waters of the Gulf of Tadjoura and the harbor.

To his left Al Greeb could see the Stars and Stripes flying above the American Embassy at the corner of Avenue Marechal on the corniche, plainly visible. The Americans occupied oceanfront property. Their flag could be seen for miles at sea.

***

Yasser al-Greeb had last visited Djibouti as a youngster with his father, travelling with a cousin from Oman aboard a motorized sailing dhow. Father and son spent a glorious summer running merchandise between the old Trucial States in the Arabian Gulf and the eastern coast of Africa on the Indian Ocean, trading as far south as Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. Along the way, they dealt in Djibouti. Young Yasser remembered an outpost in the desert that seemed like the end of the world. A few dusty stalls in a broiling hot bazaar, and flies, flies everywhere. They sold the merchants there melons carried from Mogadishu.

Al-Greeb now saw the new Djibouti of the 21st century—a magnificent multi-floor Western hotel graced the spit of land that marked the mouth of the Gulf of Tadjoura, surrounded with lush Royal palms. From the seaward side, it was a vision of a sultan’s palace. Astonishingly, young women clad in bikinis were lounging beneath sun umbrellas and prancing half-naked along the quay. These were likely the daughters of rich Saudis who would not dare dress in such a manner in the Kingdom. Even the end of the world was not immune from corruption. Al-Greeb felt a burning anger growing within his chest. He left the bridge and returned to his private stateroom.

***

A mile beyond the spit of land that was home to the new hotel, next to a petroleum jetty, the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
pulled alongside the private mole of a small shipyard owned by a Yemeni national, Hajji Wadi Hassan. The shipyard was a tiny affair, about three acres, with a single dry-dock and scaffolding for a pair of tugboats undergoing repairs. Two narrow jetties poked out into the oil-slicked waters of the harbor. It barely provided the Hajji and his handful of employees with a living.

At Captain Adnan’s order, tarps were thrown over the stern and both sides of the prow, hiding the name of the vessel. It was in Hajji Wadi Hassan’s tiny shipyard that Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb was going to perform his spectacular magic trick: to make a vessel of 3,500 tons vanish.

The shipping industry is a notoriously opaque business but Al-Greeb had been able over a period of years to accumulate certain useful facts: First, that there were about 50,000 oceangoing vessels on the waters of the globe at any given time. Of these, about 700 a year were scrapped. The working life of an ocean-going ship was between 25 and 30 years. At thirty, a ship was usually ready for recycling.

The nations that lead the world in ‘shipbreaking,’ to use the term of art, are India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, and the Philippines.

The business is simple and deadly: the ship owner sells his vessel to a scrap company, which then cuts the ship up. The average ship is 95 per cent steel, mixed with tons of paint, cadmium, asbestos, lead, PCBs, and engine oil steeped in a witch’s brew of deadly toxins. Shipbreakers recover the steel and dump the toxins into the environment. If workers touch, inhale or swallow the poisons, that is their problem, not the shipbreakers.

Since 1990, Al-Greeb observed, the shipbreaking industry had migrated from mechanized docks in the West to primitive hand labor in low-paying Asian countries with an appetite for cheap, recycled steel. Old ships were cut up by hand on open beaches. Inhuman working conditions frequently killed the workers. The product of this shipbreaking was called ‘ship steel,’ which was then reshaped into ‘rolled steel’ by cold rolling. In industrialized countries, rolled steel is banned from structural use because it cannot be made of consistent strength. Buildings and machines that are reinforced with rolled steel often fall apart.

Days earlier, lawyers in Mumbai, at Al-Greeb’s direction, had filed papers officially noting the owner’s intention to scrap the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
and sell it to a shipbreaker south of the port. The vessel’s name was removed from the roster of the world’s active ships. Now, in a quiet corner of forgotten Djibouti, the ship would be reborn under a different name. Though maritime superstition holds that changing the name of a ship brings bad luck, Yasser al-Greeb was not a superstitious man: He made his own luck. As night fell, workers from the shipyard were already working behind the screen provided by the tarps to erase
Nippon Yoku-Maru
with black paint. Before morning, they had renamed the ship, in 18-inch white letters,
Aegean Apollon, Piraeus.

To reinforce the name change painted on his ship, Al-Greeb also installed an Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder on the bridge. AIS used the ship’s VHF radio system to transmit the ship’s new name, heading, speed, and GPS location every two minutes to any terrestrial receiver within a 30-mile radius on the surface and about 140 miles directly overhead to any satellites that happened to be listening in. Though technically required on vessels of 300 tons or more, compliance with AIS regulations was lax and freighters considerably larger than Al-Greeb’s ship often failed to carry transponders. They were rarely fined.

The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
had never had such a device, and it was Al-Greeb’s belief that if maritime authorities anywhere had reason to suspect that the
Aegean Apollon
was anything other than what it appeared to be, the additional identification verification provided by the transponder would help squelch curiosity.

The next morning, the tarps were removed and a completely new ship appeared moored at Hajji Wadi Hassan’s shipyard: the
Aegean Apollon
of Piraeus Harbor, Greece. At ten o’clock, his work in Djibouti complete, Yasser al-Greeb ordered Captain Adnan to take the ship out to sea with the high tide.

The
Aegean Apollon
cast off from the jetty at Hajji Wadi Hassan’s yard, sailed due east out of port, carefully navigated the treacherous Sawabi Islands beyond the Gulf of Tadjoura, rounded Ras Siyan beyond the village of Obock on the Djibouti coast, and then steered due north through the narrow and shallow straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, the aptly named ‘Gate of Grief,’ and into the warm, soupy waters of the Red Sea.