White: A Novel (2 page)

“Closets? You mean like the one Saddam used to hide all those weapons of mass destruction you said he had before the war?”

She stopped smiling.

“Cheap shot. What we sent up to the White House and what the politicians told the world were two totally different things, and you know . . .”

“Wait . . . ,” Jeremy interrupted. “What the hell is that? Check the northwest trailhead.”

The HRT sniper leaned into the reticle of his sniper scope, intent on something very unusual. GI Jane adjusted her spotting scope, trying to follow.

“Shit . . .” was all she said.

THEY APPEARED ON
the flat-screen televisions like black dots in a field of green: a handful of bodies moving out of the jungle and stopping at the edge of the clearing.

“Who the hell are they?” the man in the John Lobb shoes asked.

A commercial satellite cruising 127 miles above Indonesia had just passed the apex of its arc, shooting video at a very steep angle. Despite the high resolution and excellent stream feed, no one in the conference room could see much except for the tops of their heads.

“I count six walkers,” Trask said, stopping a moment as another emerged from the jungle. “Check that . . . seven.”

“There’s only one civilian I know of who has the connections and the desire to find a godforsaken hole in the jungle like that,” his boss added. “It’s gotta be Mahar.”

“And the others?” the woman asked. “The intelligence said he’d be alone.”

“Intelligence?” Trask huffed. “Even the best report is just one man’s opinion—usually some tenured bureaucrat who hasn’t seen field time since Christ was a corporal.”

The three of them stared at the screen for a long moment, waiting for some kind of response from the fire team hiding in the surrounding jungle. Whether this was Mahar or not, the operators sent in to get him would surely react with force. This special ops team included some of the most capable soldiers on earth, and they had eyes on target.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” the leader said.

The others nodded. Despite technological advances in space-based imagery, there would never be any substitute for good men on the ground.

“YOU GONNA CALL
this new guy into the CP?” GI Jane asked.

Jeremy shook his head. “I’m kind of busy right now,” he whispered, fingering the trigger of his rifle and scouring the area through the reticle of his sniper scope.

At the north end of the clearing stood a Yani guide just like their own, sporting a hand-carved bow and prehistoric-looking body markings. He moved ahead of six taller men, then signaled to Banjo Man, who maintained his position near the bunkhouse.

“Sierra One to TOC,” Jane spoke softly into the telephone receiver. “We have seven, repeat
seven
new players entering from the black/ green corner, copy?”

They waited a moment for the mission planner at a tactical operations center in Bangkok to acknowledge the update. From Bangkok, these essential elements of intelligence, or EEI, would pass all the way back to a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI/CIA Joint Terrorist Threat Integration Center in Arlington, Virginia. Any word of a command-initiated assault would get relayed from there to NMARSAT units at each of the three ground cells. This communications plan seemed clumsy and time consuming, but the foreboding jungle terrain had rendered conventional options useless.

Jeremy stared through his rifle scope.

“I thought your headhunter guy said this wasn’t going down until . . .”

Midsentence, he realized there was no more time for discussion. The targets had started to move quickly from the jungle toward the huts. The task force, which consisted of just five assaulters, would lose tactical advantage if Mahar and his buddies made it inside.

“Buckle up,” Jeremy whispered. “This is going down now.”

“DAMMIT, THIS CHANGES
everything,” the woman said, focusing on the television screens.

“It’s all right,” Trask reassured her. “They can handle it.”

Mission organizers had foreseen virtually every variable, from airborne medevac contingencies to visual triggers designed to compensate for on-site communications problems. No matter how many people showed up in that compound, rules of engagement allowed for immediate, unannounced use of deadly force the moment Mahar’s capture looked tenuous.

“I don’t care if there are fifty of them as long as we get Mahar,” the leader growled. “He’s the only one we really care about.”

Neither of the others responded. They had seen enough of the war on terror to understand that no one bad guy ever shouldered all the blame.

“YOU GOT BANJO
MAN
,” Jane said.

Jeremy knew the plan. He would take the gunman standing next to the bunkhouse. A Navy SEAL just inside the southern tree line would take Castro, the only other visible sentry. Once the two men were down, five task-force assaulters would step out of the jungle and demand Mahar’s surrender. If the terrorist made any movement—any movement at all—Jeremy and his counterpart at the other side of the clearing would eliminate “targets of opportunity.”

“What do we do if they get back into the jungle?” GI Jane asked.

“They’re not getting back into the jungle,” Jeremy answered, trying not to shake his head. If only Fritz Lottspeich, his regular HRT partner, had been there to help. He knew nothing about Indonesian butterflies or esoteric tribal dialects, but the man sure as hell could hunt.

Pffft!

Jeremy squeezed the trigger of his Accuracy International AW-SP rifle, a 7.62 x 51mm caliber death stick that fired subsonic rounds and limited muzzle blast to just sixty decibels. Although the weapon’s accuracy was limited to 100 yards, anyone standing outside the suffocating vegetation around Jeremy’s sniper hide would hear nothing at all.

“Sentries down,” GI Jane observed.

Even before the two bodies hit the ground, a team of five assaulters from the Army’s Combat Applications Group and the Navy’s Surface Warfare Development Group emerged from the jungle, assault rifles at the ready. They looked like alien life-forms morphing out of the foliage, so odd and imposing in their camouflage that Mahar and his posse barely thought to flinch.

Pop, pop, pop . . .

An MP-5 erupted. The dogs dropped.

Jeremy held his crosshairs on the bridge of Mahar’s nose, just in case, but there was no need to shoot. The Yani tribesman disappeared into the jungle, little more than a spirit fading into scattered light. Mahar and his colleagues lifted their hands over their heads. A clean surrender.

“THAT’S IT,” TRASK
said, back inside the walnut-paneled office. He had moved away from the screens and now stood near a normal-looking multiplex phone. “Two sentries dead. Six players in custody. Mahar is one of them.”

This simply confirmed what they had just seen, of course. Now that the surveillance satellite had passed its apex, faces and clothing were becoming easier to distinguish.

“God almighty!” the woman suddenly exclaimed. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

The others nodded silently. Mahar was easy to spot. FBI, CIA, and Interpol photographs had made his face familiar even to casual cable news watchers. The two men beside him looked familiar, too: Ramsi al-kir Amuri, Jemaah Islamiya’s widely feared political leader, and Adnan al Shukrijuma, Mahar’s chief assassin.

But the other three looked altogether different. They wore blue jeans, sweat-stained T-shirts, and ball caps. The patch above one visor read “Bass Pro Shops.”

“WHO THE HELL
is that?” Jeremy asked, turning from his scope to his partner. But she was already gone. Jeremy just lay there and watched as the short, muscular woman burst out of the jungle and ran across the clearing toward the six newest prisoners in the U.S. government’s war on terror.

“I hope you’re better at questions than you are at answers,” Jeremy said to no one in particular. He watched as the colorful butterfly flapped its wings and drifted off the tip of his barrel in jagged, staccato-stroke flight.

AS IF ON
cue, the newly elected vice president of the United States, Elizabeth Beechum, turned toward Jordan Mitchell, the country’s wealthiest and best-known industrialist. It had been more than a year since the two first met in hostile discussions before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Unlikely allies, the two had forged an alliance of sorts, a “new century” partnership of will that reached beyond politics or traditional boundaries of business and government.

“I see it, but I don’t believe it,” Mitchell said. Intelligence reports had suggested nothing like what appeared before him on the high-resolution monitor. “How can that be?”

Beechum shook her head. Everything they had worked so hard to achieve was supposed to end here in this isolated jungle. Now that had changed.

“Damned if I know,” she growled. “But those three on the right sure as hell look like Americans.”

Book I

OPERATIONS PLANNING

In the end, it will all come down to a war between Christianity and Islam—the Prince of Light against the gutter gods of Muhammad. The sooner we get down to it, the better off all our children will be.

— Richard Alan Sykes

Christian Identity Movement member

and self-proclaimed Phineas priest

I

Monday, 14 February

12:02 GMT

Situation Room, The White House

“
ALL RIGHT, LET’S
get moving. Matthew?”

Newly elected president David Ray Venable waved his hand to quiet a room that seemed to quiver with shock and nervous energy. He stood behind his chair at the midpoint of a broad mahogany table. To his immediate left sat National Security Advisor Matthew Havelock, a former University of Pennsylvania history professor who looked down his nose through Dollar Store reading glasses at a sky-blue briefing package. Havelock folded his hands around a tumbler of slowly melting ice, trying to keep it from rattling.

“You’ve seen the morning papers, I presume, Mr. President. I think we . . .”

“Seen the papers? Is this what I hired a national security advisor to tell me? Of course I’ve seen the morning papers!”

The
Washington Post, New York Times,
and several others lay neatly stacked in front of him. Headlines trumpeted the story.

BOMBERS STRIKE AT THE HEARTLAND,
one proclaimed;
TERROR RAVAGES HOMELAND,
screamed another.
USA Today
perhaps said it best:
NATION’S WORST FEARS A REALITY.

Just before 10:00
P.M.
eastern time—nine hours earlier—terrorists had struck three targets: a popular Buckhead nightspot in Atlanta, Disneyland in Anaheim, and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Virtually every channel in broadcast news had preempted regular programming to go wall-to-wall with on-scene coverage. Local, state, and federal emergency response crews were working frantically to deal with massive casualties. Organizations from the Red Cross to small-town fire department auxiliaries and church-based volunteer groups were streaming in to help.

Washington had awakened as well, trying to bring three years of terror response planning into action. Unfortunately, the nation’s capital—the seat of virtually every federal agency from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI to intelligence gatherers like the NSA and DIA—had been paralyzed by the worst winter storm in three decades. For a city that closed its doors at the lightest dusting, this crisis could not have come at a more difficult time. The only people moving around inside the beltway had four-wheel drives or skis.

“Reports are still sketchy, sir,” Havelock said, “but based on what we know, this is the most serious attack anywhere in the world since 9/ 11.”

Venable, the former Democratic governor of Connecticut, shook his head in disbelief. He had sworn his oath to the nation’s highest office just three weeks earlier. It appeared that his so-called honeymoon had come to a crashing halt.

“Here’s what we know,” a voice interjected. It belonged to FBI director Richard Alred, a former judge, accomplished trial lawyer, and, at forty-three, the youngest Bureau head since J. Edgar Hoover. Like his pug-nosed predecessor, Alred never missed an opportunity to exercise his authority, regardless of audience, jurisdiction, or protocol.

“Experts from our Bomb Data Center at Quantico have determined that the I.E.D.s were similar in construction and sophisticated,” he said. “Well planned. They hit all three sites—thousands of miles apart—within eight seconds of each other.”

Venable crossed his arms and considered the FBI chief. The man wore close-cropped hair and a properly tailored suit over an athletic build. He spoke with remnants of a Boston accent, but the clean-cut delivery was bred of military heritage and enough time in the private sector to understand imperative. Though Alred came as a holdover from the previous administration, Venable suspected that this man would serve him well.

“I.E.D.s?” the president asked. “What are I.E.D.s?”

“Improvised explosive devices, sir: Czech-made Semtex—a particular batch with additives used in the manufacture of land mines. This special compound was exported to an Indonesian factory in 1997 and is the same chemical composition found in the 2003 Marriott bombing in Jakarta. Our investigators also found evidence of unusual e-cell timers and residue of methyl nitrate, ammonium nitrate, and fuel oil—the compound Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.”

“You think this was homegrown?”

“Not at all, sir. ANFO is one of the most common explosives out there, and these attacks bear all the hallmarks of Muslim extremists. They used truck bombs with remote detonators and planned the primary strikes to inflict maximum casualties. Once emergency crews and television cameras showed up, they set off tertiary explosives for even more devastating effects. These were well planned, expertly executed military operations.”