The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (31 page)

“So you’re saying that blowing up the Canal is better than blowing up people?”

“Exactly! Or the threat of it, anyway. Killing people evokes disgust and horror even in the minds and hearts of those who might be predisposed to support Al Qaeda. But causing the world’s richest nations to lose a trillion dollars or more a year would trigger jubilation all over the third world. Even a few American allies might be secretly pleased to see the world’s only superpower put on the economic ropes yet again. It’s a high reward, lower risk option.”

“OK, you’re making sense, but how does that explain the ship’s presence in the Gulf of Aqaba? It looks to me that they are getting ready to kill Israelis.”

“I’m not sure,” said Kate. “It could be they have transferred the device to another ship.”

Feldman’s assistant brought in the overnight cable traffic, printed out for him. Feldman could have read them on his computer, but he preferred paper.

“Well, here’s some good news from Mossad about your ship,” he said. “The Israelis have boarded her and found nothing. She’s clean. She’s now called the
Aegean Apollon
, a new name painted on her hull sometime after she left Jageshwar Shipyard.”

“So the bomb is somewhere else now.”

“Yeah, if there is a bomb,” Feldman said. “How about Mahmood? Any word?”

“Not a thing,” Kate said. “I can only guess that Al-Greeb insisted he come to him, rather than return to Peshawar.”

Feldman grunted. “And sent an expensive plane for him. What do you want to do about this Suez Canal theory?” he asked.

“Go join Phil Drayton in Port Said. That’s where I think this thing is heading.”

Feldman nodded. “Talk to Alice before you go. See if she’s got anything to give you.”

Alice Carulla reported to Kate that the newly named
Aegean Apollon
of Piraeus, Greece, had been released by the Israelis from the Port of Eilat and had promptly steamed four miles across the tip of the Red Sea to the tiny Jordanian port of Aqaba.

“So that ship is now untouchable,” Kate said. “The Israelis have given it a clean bill of health, what better credentials for a terrorist freighter? That’s like an airline passenger getting clearance from El Al.”

“I thought they would seize the ship for the name change alone,” Carulla responded, “but the owners filed the appropriate papers in Mumbai. They legalized the change of name from
Nippon Yoku-Maru
to
Aegean Apollon
. Apparently it happens all the time with ships of all sizes and nationalities. It’s amazing to me how lax shipping rules are compared to airlines, even though ships probably present greater risk to global security than airlines do.”

“It’s just a question of optics,” Kate said. “The world will worry about shipping and intermodal containers after a terrorist incident involving one, not before. Humans have the gift of hindsight, not foresight. There have been dozens of airline hijackings, and it was airliners that destroyed the Twin Towers. Go figure. We’ll regulate airliners until given reason to do otherwise.”

“You remember what Mort Feldman once said about how we plan ahead?”

“Actually I do. One of Mort’s more quotable quotes: ‘The planning horizon of the average American stretches to this evening’s six-pack of suds.’”

Kate saw that Mort Feldman had sent an email to Matt Griechek, CIA Chief of Station in Cairo, requesting permission for her to travel to Egypt, copying Phil Drayton and herself. She had heard about the flap over Drayton’s unannounced visit. Feldman’s confrontational style had apparently been toned down a little since Mahmood’s disappearance.

***

The American Embassy in central Cairo is a 20-storey fortress-like concrete monolith in the Garden City sector of the city, a posh, quiet, and leafy European-style neighborhood that is home to diplomats, five-star hotels, and the elite ‘
Mere de Dieu’
School for Girls.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Garden City was the most privileged address in a Cairo that even then was sprawling far into the desert. Newcomers are always stunned to learn that the largest landholder in Garden City is the Vatican, which continues to be in sole possession of about ten per cent of the land there, including the grounds housing the school.

From the roof of the Embassy, a professional slugger could probably hit a baseball all the way to the center of Tahrir Square, the political center of Cairo, which is but a few hundred feet to the northeast. The Embassy’s window abutments look like they were extruded by a waffle iron, but the windows themselves provide excellent vistas of the ancient city. CIA has a portion of the 16th floor, with a view of the park-like gardens of Shepheard’s Hotel and the lions at the base of the Palace of the Nile Bridge. Kate could see a dozen lateen-rigged feluccas, the traditional Egyptian river craft, sailing down the wide and placid waterway as they had daily for the last five thousand years.

“How would you like to transfer here?” Matt Griechek asked Kate. He was a short, wiry man with the leathery skin of an outdoorsman. “I heard about your shoot-down last February in Pakistan. You’re a winner. I could use you.” To Kate it seemed like a lifetime ago.

“The guy we were going to interview, Yasser al-Greeb, was impersonated that day by a suicide bomber, but it’s the real Al-Greeb we’re after right now. We think he’s going to try to sail a nuclear bomb right through the Suez Canal.”

Griechek barked with laughter.

“Yeah, I saw the heads-up from Feldman.”

“You don’t seem too concerned...”

“Do you have any idea how many threats to the Canal are reported to me every month? And how many of them turn out to be bogus? And in the meantime, we’ve had a year of revolutionaries in Tahrir Square to contend with, the fall of Mubarak, the rebirth of the Muslim Brotherhood, the threatened end of a stable Egyptian ally for the United States... Al Qaeda is yesterday’s news. I’ve got enough real problems on my hands. You better not add to them. And you better not ask me for help. I’m shorthanded as it is.”

“Actually, I’m fine,” Kate said. “This was more in the nature of a courtesy call.”

“Before you go, one of my people wants to meet you,” Griechek added. “He says he knows you. Keven Smyth, ex-Navy SEAL, my new man from Afghanistan.” Griechek pressed a buzzer on his telephone.

Kate brightened. Smyth had helped her track down Minh Kwang and unravel the financial mysteries of BanKoNoKo in Kabul. She now saw his smiling face framed in Griechek’s office door.

“Hey, I heard you were coming this way.” Smyth seemed even taller and brawnier than she remembered him, looking, if anything, even more tanned and healthy. Life at Bagram had allowed him plenty of time to exercise in the thin air and high-altitude sun. She rose from her chair and shook hands with him.

Kate thanked Griechek and left his office with Smyth.

“Have you checked in with Phil Drayton?” Smyth asked her when they were beyond earshot of Griechek and his assistant.

“Yeah, as soon as I landed. I’m going to be joining him in Port Said. He said he thinks he’s found a way to see if that bomb is really on board the ship we’re shadowing, if it comes through the Canal, that is.”

“Actually, he already enlisted my help in that area, behind the boss’s back of course. You guys sure like to break the rules.”

“I didn’t know you and Phil knew each other.”

“We didn’t,” Smyth said, “but he told me he had worked with you, and that was enough of an introduction.”

Kate was flattered in spite of herself.

“So what’s his idea?” she asked.

Smyth steered her toward an elevator and out of the Embassy. They walked together two blocks toward the Corniche, overlooking the broad, muddy Nile and the island of Gezira. Smyth bought a bag of
lib
—peanuts and pumpkinseeds in a cone made from newspaper—from a street vendor, which they shared.

Amateur fishermen were trying to land Nile perch on the water’s edge. Tea and coffee vendors hawked liquid refreshment from enormous filigreed silver contraptions hanging with cups and bells. Passersby rented plastic chairs to sit quietly on the banks of the great river.

When they had shared a few pleasant memories of their time in Kabul, Smyth changed the subject and asked her if she had ever heard of the Suez Canal Overhead Crossing line.

“Whoa, Keven, you’ve lost me completely,” Kate said. “You can safely assume that all I know about the Suez Canal is that there is water in it and that ships use it to get from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.”

“And vice versa.”

“OK, smartass, and vice versa. So what is this overhead crossing do-hickey?”

“The Overhead Crossing Line is one of several construction projects that go over or under the Canal.”

“Under the Canal? I had no idea. You mean like the Baltimore tunnel under the harbor?”

“Yeah, same idea. There are a number of tunnels, including the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel, that connect the Sinai Peninsula in Asia with the continent of Africa at Suez.”

“Never heard of any of this.”

“There is no reason why you should. Most people haven’t. Ahmed Hamdi is only two miles long, so it’s not that big a deal in terms of the engineering. But the Overhead Crossing Line is in fact a big deal. It was built in 1998 for a pair of 500 kilovolt lines suspended 750 feet above the water. Clearance for ships is 500 feet, so the cables are well above the tallest vessels that are allowed through.”

“So how does that help us?”

“Well, that’s the cool part. With the help of the Egyptians, about nine years ago we installed an array of sensitive voltage and amperage meters, magnetometers, and other devices on either side of the electrical lines. It helps us do all sorts of things, from measuring the thickness of the hulls of ships that pass below to gauging the amount and variety of radioactive materials that are making their way through the Canal.”

“I didn’t know that radioactive materials were even allowed.” Kate said.

“Oh sure. Everything from medical equipment to nuclear weapons aboard U.S. Navy warships. There is an entire subsection of the navigation rules for the Canal that address transport of nuclear materials. Our own Smithsonian Institution in Washington conducted a study for the Egyptians measuring risk to port workers during transport of radioactive materials through Suez harbor. It turned out to be negligible.”

“OK, so tell me how these overhead wires measure stuff for you.”

“Hey, I’m not sure I understand the physics. Just believe me when I tell you that when a ship goes under those wires, it’s sort of like you stepping through a metal detector at an airport. The movement of metallic objects through the electrical and magnetic fields creates small fluctuations that can be measured. Ditto with radioactivity. It’s high-tech and it’s reliable.”

“Even if this bomb they have is shielded in lead deep inside the ship?”

“Well, it depends how much lead I guess. But we’ve been able to learn a great deal about foreign warships that have come through the Canal, including those with nuclear reactors and ships carrying nuclear armaments, and I’m assured by the techies that if your vessel has a tactical nuke aboard, the dials will light up and the sirens will scream.”

***

Kate called Phil Drayton after she walked back to the American Embassy with Keven Smyth. She agreed to have a drink with Smyth after work. She had not bothered to check into a hotel, thinking she would go to Port Said before nightfall, but Drayton suggested a number of things she could accomplish in Cairo that he had been unable to organize from Port Said, including trying to determine where the optimal point for an attempted blockage of the Canal was likely to be.

“There is some history we should try to check out,” Drayton said. “It may help us determine where Al-Greeb is going to make his play, if indeed he’s using the playbook you suggested back in Islamabad. When they were on the losing end of the Six-Day War back in 1967, the Egyptians deliberately blocked the Canal by sinking a number of vessels. Fifteen ships that were in transit were stuck in the Canal almost a decade, from June 1967, when the war broke out, to 1975, when the wreckage was finally cleared away and the Canal was re-opened. They came to be known as the ‘Yellow Fleet’ because they became covered with yellow dust from the desert.”

“Why do we care what happened forty years ago?” Kate asked.

“Because it’s essential to understand how the Canal was blocked in the past, on the theory that Al-Greeb will surely have researched it and try to exploit this history. I’ve seen pictures that blew me away. When the Israelis marched across the Sinai, they built the Bar-Lev Line, including a huge land bridge across the Canal made of ten-ton boulders and sand loaded on top of sunken barges. The Canal was totally blocked, literally, with rock and earth.

“It became a stagnant cesspool. In the early 1970s, divers had to search the landlocked Canal inch by inch looking for magnetic mines and other booby traps. We’ve got to understand all this if we want to figure out what Al-Greeb is planning. At the Suez Canal Authority here, I saw a photo of the 900-ton stern of a passenger ship, the
Mecca
, resting on the bank of the Canal near Port Fuad. American divers cut apart ten big ships the Egyptians scuttled in 1967. The sections were raised with cranes and heavy-lift helicopters.”

“So where am I going to find all this information?”

“All I know is that I can’t get details at the Suez Canal Authority here in Port Said,” Drayton said, “so maybe you could check with Smyth?”

Kate thought that Drayton’s background as a researcher had gotten the better of him. She was more concerned about finding a way to board the
Aegean Apollon
surreptitiously and finding the nuclear device to disarm it.