The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (28 page)

“Yeah, and I tried to explain it to him too. Were you able to get Farooq on board?”

“Yes, I think so. He’s going to contact you directly. He seemed especially worried that our target ship might damage the Canal. He guessed what it is that might be on board.”

“Age hasn’t dimmed him.”

“There is only one convoy from Suez to Port Said per day. It leaves the Red Sea at 6:00 AM and arrives at Port Said at nightfall. There is no way a ship can get through without our spotting it.”

“OK, I’ll wait to hear from Farooq, and I’ll take any further flak from Cairo. In the meantime, we have a new development in Saudi. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone. I sent you an encrypted update. You can read all about it. Wait in Port Said for new instructions.”

***

Drayton used his Blackberry to access the Internet and recovered the message Feldman had sent him. The gist of it was that a Pashtun tribesman in Jeddah named Zabet had contacted Saudi authorities after leaving the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
to complete the Haj in Mecca. He claimed to be a driver who had taken an arms shipment from Tashkent to Karachi. He was recruited by Yasser al-Greeb but had had second thoughts upon leaving the ship to undertake his religious pilgrimage.

“The man Zabet appears to be a low-level driver on the fringes of terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, more like a bystander,” the summary read. “Fear of capture or a religious conversion prompted him to tell Saudi police what little he knows. He provide descriptions of two foreigners who hired him in Tashkent that match profiles of LeClerc and Marchenko.”

Drayton did a quick calculation. At fifteen knots, a freighter could make Suez from Jeddah in three days. That meant that the next day, two days at most, the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
would be visible from his hotel balcony entering the vast Mediterranean.

The drop at the Mohabbat Khan Mosque was serviced five days after Brigadier Mahmood left his message there. The reply was brief and positive: Brigadier Mahmood was to meet with Al-Greeb in three days, following their usual procedure.

“So remind me, what’s the usual procedure?” Mort Feldman asked when he learned the news.

“Mahmood arrives at the mosque the morning of the appointed day,” Kate said, “he changes into street clothes inside the mosque, waits in the square until a car comes to pick him up, usually after five or six hours to make sure he’s alone.”

“It’s a hell of a risk he’s willing to take for us.” Feldman said. The telephone could not mask the strain in his voice.

“Not only is he in favor of it, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He told me that Al Qaeda wouldn’t dare consider harming an ISI officer. They’re convinced ISI secretly backs them.”

“That may not be far from the truth. I’m going to have to touch base with Olof on this. I hate to invite flak from headquarters, but this is a first, and I have always thought that Olof was pushing Mahmood because he didn’t think he would deliver.”

“He’ll deliver. The more information we have about what Al-Greeb has been up to, the easier it will be on us. If we can swing it, it would be good to debrief this new guy Zabet in Jeddah before the meeting. Find out if Al-Greeb was on board the ship and maybe other things that can help us verify statements.”

“I’ve been trying to decide whether to send you or Phil Drayton, who is already in Port Said.” He told Kate that he would inform Wheatley in Washington and call her back. It was likely that Wheatley would want to be involved in planning the meeting with Al-Greeb.

“This isn’t going to be a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed situation,” Kate said. “Mahmood is doing this on his own. ISI will never go for another takedown, not so soon after OBL. So if Olof is expecting a new prisoner to take home to Guantanamo, that’s just not gonna happen.”

“I understand that, but I’m not sure that Olof does. He thinks the Pakistanis can still be pushed around.”

Feldman said he hoped he would join her in Peshawar. If not, they would continue to coordinate the planning for Mahmood’s meeting by phone.

Kate was still living at Mahmood’s official digs in the old British cantonment, a home, she had learned, built by a British colonel in the 1940s. Her relationship with Mahmood was still very much professional, though Kate had perceived growing warmth in Mahmood’s treatment of her, as though she were a distant cousin. About her own emotions, Kate thought it best not to inquire too deeply. What was important to her was the mission, always the mission, and to prevent whatever device Yasser al-Greeb had smuggled out of Russia from being inflicted upon the world.

Kate spent her days at the Consulate doing her best to help Carulla locate the ship in the Red Sea. When Saudi authorities contacted CIA to let them know of the driver named Zabet and his strange story, Kate called a friend posted at the United States Consulate in Jeddah. She learned that Zabet was still being held incommunicado by the Saudis in a safe house to which Americans did not yet have access. It was a delicate situation.

The Saudis expected to get as much as they gave. They refused to consider turning Zabet over to the Americans. It was possible that Pakistan would be more successful in gaining access to him. At one time he had been a refugee living in Peshawar. ISI got along better with the Saudi Mukhabarat than CIA did anyway. Kate considered trying to get to Jeddah herself, as she often felt that she was doing little good waiting in Peshawar.

Brigadier Mahmood telephoned her at eleven from his office near the Consulate and invited her to lunch.

“I want to take you to Lala’s Grill, a change of pace for both of us.”

“At Green’s Hotel?”

“You know it? That’s the one. A favorite of our expatriates,” Mahmood said.

“You know I love Pakistani cuisine.”

“Yes, but not every day all the time. This is more for me than for you. I have a yearning for clean white tablecloths and gleaming knives and forks. If I could fly to London or Paris for the day, I would do so.”

“So you’re really just a closet Westerner?”

Mahmood laughed.

“Yes, I admit it freely! There is much I love about the West, perhaps more to be found in London than America, to be quite frank.”

They made a date for noon.

Green’s Hotel was an inexpensive 50-room hostel in a nondescript building half a mile south of the American Consulate on the corner of Saddar Road and Hospital Road. Twenty-something tourists favored the hotel as a place where they could be comfy and secure. The grubby exterior belied the lovely open court within, draped with cascading green vines.

Mahmood was already there, waiting for her, seated at a table in Lala’s Grill drinking mineral water.

“Anything new on the location of the ship?” Mahmood asked, rising to greet her.

“Are we going to talk business right from the git-go?”

“Well, then, how are you my dear, forgive me for being so poorly versed in the social arts.”

Kate thought Mahmood was likely the most socially adept of all the men she had worked with, starting with Mort Feldman, who was rude not via ignorance but by perverse choice, through Phillip Drayton, who was simply nerdy, and Olof Wheatley, a man who tried, unsuccessfully, to feign the real urbanity that Mahmood expressed completely naturally.

“Well, to answer your question, Alice thinks she’s found a ship close to the profile parked at a Jeddah wharf three days ago. It’s apparently a container ship that has tarps pulled over most of the cargo and superstructure. You don’t often see that, but of course it was sufficient to make the ship look utterly different from the perspective of the satellites.”

Mahmood ordered veal cutlets with
pommes frittes
, Kate a chicken breast with wild rice. Kate thought Mahmood was right: it was pleasant every once in a while to forget you were in South Asia by eating Western cuisine, well-prepared by a chef who knew how to pull it off.

“So we are still thinking then that the vessel is heading for Suez?”

“That’s a real puzzle for me,” Kate whispered, though no one was sitting near their table. “The Red Sea is like a bathtub. Absolutely confined, with no easy exits. Why would they pick a waterway that is so constrained?”

“Perhaps because it is unexpected?” Mahmood ventured.

“And another thing—why is Al-Greeb still in Peshawar and available to meet with you when his pet project is only a day or two from its destination? That just doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, that is something I wanted to clear up with you. When we heard from Al-Greeb, he did not say he would meet with me in Peshawar, he simply said that he was available to meet with me, which is not quite the same thing.”

“So you might have to travel?”

“The message did not make that explicit, but the wording was different than in the past. I am making a guess. And that guess is that Yasser al-Greeb left the ship at Jeddah three days ago and is either already back in Peshawar or somewhere nearby.”

Kate’s first thought was that she had to tail Mahmood. Her second thought was that she should keep her first thought to herself.

***

“Kate, do you have the satellite output on your screen?”

Alice Carulla was on the phone in Islamabad, taking Kate through the IMINT from Jeddah.

“Yes, I’m looking at a scan of the port facilities labeled
Meena Jeddah Al-Islami
.”

“That’s the right one. It’s a port facility next to the ARAMCO Refinery. OK, now look at the tiny vessel by the red crane, at 50 feet to the inch scale.”

“I still can’t believe this, I’m like a kid with a new toy,” Kate said. “I can see trucks, and I’m guessing these little squares are cars?”

“And this isn’t the best we can do, but it’s the best I’ve got without getting NSA to sign off on a change in orbit of USA-224 or one of the older KH optical imaging satellites, or an overflight by a drone.”

“USA-224? What’s that?”

“The latest and greatest. Think of it as a souped-up version of the Hubble Space Telescope pointed toward the Red Sea from 160 to 620 miles up. It can resolve 4 inches. Three on a clear day.”

“They’re not putting you on a budget are they?”

“Not at all. But more mag isn’t useful right now. We’re trying to spot a 200 foot ship, not a bicycle.”

“I get it,” Kate said, peering at the image of the
Nippon Yoku-Maru.
“So how do you know that this is it? The superstructure looks different from the India shipyard shots. And it’s so tiny next to the other ships nearby.”

“Those are major freighters, 500 to 600 feet long. Do you see that monster with the green deck next to the refinery? That’s the
Sirius Star
supertanker, 1,100 feet from stem to stern, ransomed by Somali pirates a few years ago for three million dollars. I’m confident that the small vessel near the red crane is our baby. The external dimensions are identical to the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
, and I can see the outline of intermodals under the tarps. They’ve done some minor painting, probably changed the name of the ship, and they’ve off-loaded four additional containers since India, but this is definitely the
Nippon Yoku-Maru,
docked four days ago at Jeddah’s main port facility.”

Kate congratulated Carulla for finding the missing ship, but the issue now was where she had sailed after leaving Jeddah? Had subsequent satellite photography located her?

“I do have a sat-com image of the freighter one day’s sailing out of port, heading north toward Suez. If she’s maintaining her 15-knot-per-hour cruising speed, she will reach the Canal today or tomorrow.”

“I really wonder if we should mess around with trying to have a discussion with Yasser al-Greeb when we could be trying to board the ship,” Kate said.

“I know Olof Wheatley has been in touch with DOD and the Navy,” Carulla said.  “The aircraft carrier
USS Enterprise
transited the Canal two months ago, and two weeks later the guided missile cruiser
USS Leyte Gulf
went through. Can you imagine a 90,000-ton aircraft carrier using the Canal to reach the Red Sea? The bottom line is that the U.S. Navy is highly mobile and that we now have serious Fifth Fleet firepower in the same ocean as the bad guys. If Al-Greeb wants to take on the Navy, that’s not going to end well for him.”

“And if Al-Greeb has left orders to detonate the bomb if attacked?”

“Well, then it would explode at sea. A tactical nuclear bomb is not a large weapon by any means, and it is certainly less effective on the high seas than in an urban environment. If American military vessels have just two or three miles buffer separating them from the bomb, they’ll easily survive.”

“I don’t see what they gain by attacking naval vessels,” Kate said.

“You’re right. They’ve already done that when they put a hole in the side of the
USS Cole
. That can’t be the target. It would make much more sense to me if they snuck the bomb into a big city. The real value of a nuclear bomb decreases if you deploy it.”

“You’re assuming logic is more important than hate,” Kate said.

“Look, we have to have a framework to think about their next move. It’s not all about logic, but it’s not all about emotion either. They’ve done some serious planning to get this far.”

“So you’re thinking they hide the bomb in a big city and just threaten to use it? Nuclear blackmail.”

“That’s got to be one of the top scenarios.”

“OK, then maybe this could be fruitful. Let’s think in terms of what the options available to them are.”