The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (29 page)

“That’s made easier for us by what I said earlier about the Red Sea. The Red Sea presents limited egress: They can head for Suez and the Canal, which is what they appear to be doing. Or they can retrace their route and round the Horn of Africa heading for Asia or the eastern coast of Africa.”

“Where else?”

“I think those two capture eighty per cent of what’s feasible. Of course, there is always a chance that they’ll head north but turn right at Ras Mohammed, heading northeast.”

Kate called up a map of the Red Sea on her computer and saw immediately what Alice Carulla was talking about. At the upper end of the narrow body of water, the seas divided at Cape Mohammed near the Egyptian resort town of Sharm Al Sheikh. The left branch of the Red Sea continued two hundred miles northwest to Suez. The right branch headed 150 miles northeast to Eilat, in the Gulf of Aqaba.

“They can reach directly into Israel without even approaching the Suez Canal. How could we miss something so obvious?”

“Hey! Speak for yourself. I have been on to that option from the start. But let me also be the first to say that it looks a hell of a lot better on paper than it does in practice.”

“Heading for Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba? Why is that not a good move?”

“Eilat is a small port and vacation destination—50,000 people in population, tops. In theory, you could unload a package at Eilat and take it onboard a panel truck to Route 90, one of Israel’s major highways, and from there into the heart of the nation. But the Israelis probably have the toughest port security of any country on the planet. Border security with them is existential. They practice it as a science. How would Al-Greeb get a bomb off his ship at Eilat? Even with the best shielding imaginable, the Israelis would detect it. They have tricks no one else knows about. Israel could not have survived this long if they hadn’t figured this one out long ago.

“That’s why I don’t think this is more than a ‘Plan B’ sort of option for the terrorists,” Carulla continued. “At a port like Jaffa next to Tel Aviv, you don’t need to unload the bomb. Just detonating it within the ship does the job. You kill a lot of people, goal accomplished. In Eilat, you’ve got to rely on surface transport to reach major population centers. That complicates the planning infinitely more.”

“So your best guess is Suez.”

“Everything I’ve learned as a targeter tells me Suez is where that ship is heading,” Alice Carulla said.

The dawn broke softly in pastel pinks and blues over the pine trees and deodars. Mahmood left his villa for the Mohabbat Khan Mosque in the Old City. His driver took him. The tranquility of the tidy, tree-lined streets was much as it had been that day in early May when he had last visited Yasser al-Greeb, a meeting that now seemed distant in time and memory.

As the car purred along the road, he recalled an odious cliché that was popular in the English language press. It went “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

To equate a terrorist with a freedom fighter was to equate a means with an end. Terrorism was a methodology, a kind of violent political gymnastics, but freedom was always a destination. This was a fine point of philosophy that had eluded Mahmood’s colleagues in the ISI. It also seemed to elude CIA.

At their last meeting, Yasser al-Greeb had said to him that “I am opposed to terrorism but I also do not confuse terrorism with revolutionary violence.”

What did that mean? What was the difference between terrorism and revolutionary violence? Perhaps this was a subject to be explored in a classroom at the Command and Staff College in Quetta. To Mahmood, it was mainly a question of the integrity of the actor rather than what could be derived from analyzing the act itself.

Al-Greeb surely thought of himself as a thinker and a doer, but to Mahmood he seemed more like a man in the grip of powerful and evil moods, lashing out at a world in which he had no accepted place.

Mahmood did not much fear Yasser al-Greeb. In his lifetime, he had known Pakistani military men, especially younger men, who shared Al-Greeb’s views, at least in terms of the rhetoric they were couched in. Mahmood understood these attitudes as a kind of manly Pakistani braggadocio and he was not too censorious of it. What motivated Al-Greeb and the others was not a political philosophy, it seemed, but rather pure anger and a desire for the comeuppance of Westerners whom they perceived to be scorning them.

This was a potent mindset, a kind of anti-racism, or a racism directed against those elite Western white folks who thought themselves so high and mighty, British and American. Indeed, Mahmood had felt it himself, feelings that were more about releasing steam than they were political thought or social analysis. Sometimes you just wanted to tell CIA to—well…..

And so Yasser al-Greeb hardly seemed to Mahmood to be an alien being, which is how Americans seemed to regard members of Al Qaeda, creatures so unlike themselves even in the way their brains were hardwired that they could not be regarded as fellow humans.

Quite the contrary, Al-Greeb was all too human, but his very anger itself, those fulminating feelings against Americans, was a weakness not a strength. Perhaps, indeed, Al-Greeb was far too angry to be safely tolerated by his fellow inhabitants on such a small and unsafe planet.

By the time his car reached the Old City, Peshawar had fully awakened to the new day. The explosion of human activity in such tight confines as the ancient bazaars had already erupted in a cacophony of noise and dust and smoke.

Mahmood dismissed his driver, telling him not to return until called for. He strode into the mosque, not caring who might see him. He changed his clothes at the end of the corridor accessed from a door behind the
minbar,
the same room he had used in May, donning the dirty old
shalwar kameez
and turban his driver had left for him a day or two earlier.

He had no time to stay within the temple to pray, but rather walked briskly outside, thinking now of Kate Langley, whom he had left at his residence in the cantonment.

What of Kate? Mahmood was deeply drawn to her. He found over the years that his relationships with traditional Pakistani women were shallow. It pained him that this was so. There was so much of his life, especially his mental life, that he could not discuss with them or share. And he had found equally that his relationships with the more Westernized Pakistani women were strained also because, too often, they found the military culture he loved oppressive.

So Mahmood discovered that he had entered middle age a single man enduring a solitary loneliness occasionally broken by brief dalliances. Now he found himself emotionally and physically attracted to an American spy. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Mahmood thought, recalling an American poet. And I am full of contradictions.

An hour after he began wandering the narrow lanes off of Andar Sheher Bazaar, he spotted a wraith-thin, dark man in a solid black turban tied above the forehead, the distinctive sign of the Afghani Taliban. Mahmood stared at him long and hard, and the tall man returned the stare. It was the same intermediary who had met him in May. Brigadier Mahmood walked across the plaza in front of the mosque to meet him.

***

Kate awoke after Mahmood had already left the house, her brain filled with the same thoughts that had prevented easy sleep the night before—annoyance that it was not possible for her to meet Yasser al-Greeb.

She had discussed it yet again with Mahmood at dinner. His meeting with Al-Greeb was almost a routine event for him, yet he would not countenance any talk of sharing the engagement. The Pakistani general recognized that he and Al-Greeb were on opposite sides of a life-and-death quarrel, but in some sense they were brought together by their Muslim faith. They could have a discussion, not always in the form of an argument. And of course, bringing a Western woman to such a meeting was inconceivable. Kate ‘got it,’ but that did not make it easier to accept.

“Like the Sunnis and the Shia are brought together by their shared Muslim faith?” she had asked Mahmood sarcastically the previous evening over dinner.

“I put it imperfectly,” Mahmood said. “What I meant was that at some level Yasser al-Greeb accepts that ISI and the Government of Pakistan does not belong in the same camp as the ‘near enemy’ he so often rails against.”

“Meaning the Saudis and the Jordanians.”

“Yes, in the sense that Al Qaeda’s leaders do not believe that Pakistan has compromised itself with Western interests to quite the same degree. There are scales of apostasy in their calculus. I suppose the fact that Pakistan is the first Islamic nation to possess an atomic weapon helps also, in Al-Greeb’s mind. We have demonstrated some international muscularity. And the fact that I was previously associated with the Strategic Forces Command perhaps also makes a difference with him.”

“So their disagreements with you are more in the nature of a friendly spat rather than war,” Kate said, barely suppressing the anger at the hypocrisy she found in Mahmood’s analysis.

“As usual Kate, you put it so beautifully. I wish I had your gift for language.”

Kate wondered how Al-Greeb would react if he knew that Mahmood was sharing his villa with an American CIA agent. Mahmood had a rejoinder for that as well, though she would never had called him on it. He had volunteered it himself, without being challenged.

“No doubt he would congratulate me for having seduced a beautiful American woman.”  Mahmood said proudly.

“You really believe you are completely invulnerable to this guy?”

“Not at all. But I am not part of their inner circle. I imagine they care very little whom I dine with, or befriend.”

Kate had also confessed her desire to shadow Mahmood when he went to the mosque, but he rightly pointed out that this would be viewed differently than his having had dinner with her. Besides, adopting a disguise in Pakistan was not the same thing as shadowing a diplomat in Washington. She was not trained for it and would stand out like the foreigner she was. It took skills that could not be taught overnight to blend into the streets of Peshawar.

She dressed hastily and took the Suzuki Samurai she had borrowed from the Consulate to her makeshift office there. She had become almost like a temporary employee. Most of the American staff knew she was working on a special project no one could talk about, and they kept their distance. She telephoned Mort Feldman the minute she reached her desk.

“It’s happening this morning,” she said simply.

“So he’ll contact you when he can?”

“That’s the deal.”

“Call me the minute you know something.”

And so now more waiting. And sitting around feeling useless. Shortly before noon, the Regional Security Officer, a middle-aged former FBI man who liked her and who had known her in the old days before she was kicked out of Islamabad, wandered by Kate’s desk.

“I got a call this morning from a friendly PAF Squadron Leader at Base Peshawar by the airport. He told me that an unmarked Lear flew into the base last night.”

Kate’s ears perked up. Could this be Al-Greeb flying in from parts unknown?             

“So that’s unusual?”

“Very. As you know, the Pakistan Air Force shares the runways at Peshawar International Airport with civilian aircraft,” the RSO said, “but the PAF Base itself, including the hangars, is strictly segregated. Totally off limits to non-PAF craft.”

“The base is east of the main airport facilities, I remember.”

“That’s right. So anyway, unmarked civilian aircraft are always parked with the other non-military craft, never inside the base.”

“And this tells you what?”

“That someone very important with ties to the Pakistani Air Force landed in Peshawar last night, and parked his plane in a spot that would preclude any snooping.”

“Did your informant tell you when the Lear came in?”

“No. He became aware of it this morning. It’s just sitting there with blocks.”

“And it’s there right now?”

“As of ten minutes ago it was.”

“Is there any way you can get me inside the air base?”

“Are you fucking kidding? No way!”

“Then, how about this. Is the aircraft visible from anywhere near the airport?”

The grizzled former FBI man stroked his chin and thought.

“Sure,” he said, “from the top of the tower at the Pearl Continental, or from the roof of the FedEx office on Grand Trunk Road.”

Kate thanked him for the tip and dashed to her Samurai. She remembered the Pearl, which had been nearly destroyed in a bomb blast in 2009. It was a five-mile drive from Hospital Road, going east on the Grand Trunk Road. She would pass the FedEx office on the way and could stop there if it looked promising.

***

Kate had seen pictures of the rubble of the old Pearl Continental, a five-star hotel near the airport. She had not been in Pakistan at the time of the attack, but she remembered photos of flight attendants streaming out of the main entrance, handkerchiefs to their noses and mouths to keep the cement dust and smoke out of their lungs.

The explosion had taken place June 10, 2009. Seventeen people died and fifty more were injured. An obscure militant group, never heard from before or since, took credit. The United Nations immediately evacuated its employees from Peshawar and the Americans cancelled a contract that had provided temp housing for USG employees on TDY duty. It was just another violent outrage with two-digit casualties that had injured Pakistan far more than the foreign enemies who were the putative targets of the terrorists.

The renovated and refurbished hotel reopened in January 2010, proudly standing at its old location, 25 Bara Road, about a thousand yards from the principal north-to-south runway of Peshawar International Airport.

The hotel was built somewhat like a child’s jack, with two of the six tips missing. A central elevator tower rose eight stories above two parallel wings that were at right angles to each other, overlooking a central swimming pool embraced by the two arms of the hotel.

Kate soon reached the parking lot. If there was any suggestion left of the catastrophic bombing, it was not evident to Kate’s eyes. She parked outside the entrance and made her way to the uppermost floor of the central tower. She had no difficulty reaching the roof, which had a terrace that served as an observation deck for guests who wanted to watch planes take off and land.