Flash Point

32

“I have the information, Joseph. If you still want it. If you think it is reliable.”

“You have the Sheikh’s location?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you how—”

“You sure as hell can, and you will. If you think I’m going to try to sell this to our people, and ultimately the President, I need to know where this information came from and how reliable it is.”

Efraim breathed deeply. “After we spoke I sat in my office and stared out the window for many minutes. I was shocked beyond description. Not only that you would believe what you said of Israel but that you would believe it of me. That we would plot to have the United States do our fighting for us and trick you into it. And not just trick you in any way, but by murdering our own people.”

“We have longer arms than you. And stronger. And when we get angry, we will accomplish our military objective. You know that. But before we talk about the Sheikh, tell me about Irit.”

“I asked them to find everyone who ever knew her. All the stories are the same. She was on vacation by herself. No one had the objective of recruiting an American. I have confirmed that.”

Kinkaid wasn’t satisfied. “Is Israel above spying on the United States?”

“There used to be people here, you know some of them, who would not think twice. But we believe in the building of a relationship founded on trust. We do not do it anymore. There were a few rogues who had that in mind. They’re long gone. This is a new era. Ever since Ehud Barak, who was with Aman — military intelligence as you know — he has brought a greater sense, of, shall we say, maturity, to everything we do. We want no more mistakes. No more miscalculations. Everything we do, even covert, is reviewed by at least three levels. I have read the reports on the raid. There were no Israelis dressing up as Assassins dressed up as Israelis to fool everyone.”

Kinkaid wished he could see his friend’s face. He had enough experience to know how people in the intelligence world lie to you. They look you right in the eye and defy you to disbelieve them. “Thank you for checking.”

“Yes, of course. It was very difficult. Some wanted to know the origin of the request. I of course had to tell them, and they… didn’t know how to react. To laugh, or to become furious. They all felt that we need to be on the same side of this one, and it would be very smart for someone sympathetic to the Sheikh to sow doubt between us. They wanted me to ask you about your young Turk. He of the wild eyes. Is there any chance he is sympathetic to the Sheikh? Or at least the greater Arab cause?”

Kinkaid felt as if he had been struck in the gut. “How could that be?”

“What is his name?”

“I can’t disclose names of task force members.”

“I am about to disclose information to you so sensitive it could put someone’s life directly at risk and you won’t tell me a name?”

“Let’s just say your point is well taken.”

“How so?”

“He is Arabic.”

“From where did his family come?”

“Syria.”

There was a long pause on the scrambled phone line. “Be very careful, Joseph. Friends who are close to you can wield the sharpest knives.”

“I will be careful.”

“I must ask you to be sure not to tell him the source of the information on the Sheikh that I am about to give you. You must give me your word he will not be allowed to know.”

“He’s a member of the task force.”

“Take him off it. Or create a new compartment. Code word access only. And make sure he’s not on the list for access. You must do this for me.”

“That could create real problems for me.”

“I am not going to risk a man’s life because someone is holding something against us.” He waited for Kinkaid to interrupt him but Kinkaid was quiet. “You have brought up Pollard before. Tell me, did your Turk bring him up or did you think of Pollard on your own?”

“We both brought it up.”

“As I thought.”

“Look, I’ll make sure he’s out of the loop. That’s all I can do.”

“Your word is good enough,” he said reluctantly, hinting of additional reservations. “But if he does somehow get his hands on it, and the information makes it into the wrong hands, it could result in… it could have bad results.”

“Of course,” Kinkaid replied. “Tell me everything you know.”

“We spoke of targets last time. Three.”

“Yes. The three fortresses.”

“Exactly. You have accepted them as legitimate targets, and have been bombing two of them all night—”

“Yes—”

“All except one.”

“The one in Iran.”

“Yes. The oldest and most important. Alamut. Why have you not attacked there, Joseph?”

“Too far, too hard, and we doubted he would be there when he seems to be staging out of Lebanon or Syria. And our overhead imagery didn’t make it look like a place that saw a lot of activity.”

“Then you have missed him.”

“He’s at Alamut?” Kinkaid asked, dismayed.

“He is.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’re sure. Very sure.”

“How can you be so sure? Our satellites don’t show anything that gives us that confidence, Efraim. Tell me what gives you such confidence.”

“First, you must answer something. If I tell you this information, do I have your assurance that you will use it? I despise wasting good intelligence. Too many times, we have gathered information, only to watch the politicians urinate all over it in a big play to advance their own careers. Tell me about the people above you. Are they willing to go into Iran and get this Sheikh? Because if they aren’t, I will save the intelligence for my people alone. They know what to do with it.”

Kinkaid hesitated. This piece of information could make his career. He could ride off into the sunset knowing he had brought to the United States the single most important piece of intelligence information in the last decade — the exact location of the one of the most hated and feared terrorists ever to attack the country. He had already promised to cut Sami out of the loop — even though he had no intention of doing it — after the Sheikh. Now he had to promise to attack Alamut. Whatever that meant. How could he promise that politicians and the military would do something about anything? And what if they didn’t? What was Efraim going to do about it? Not tell him the information? That couldn’t be it, because he would already know it. “Yes. They have the nerve. I am sure.”

“Can you guarantee they’ll pursue the Sheikh? I need your personal assurance, Joseph.”

“They will go after him. The only thing keeping them from it now is they don’t know where he is.”

“But you already know Alamut is a target, and it has not been attacked. They are afraid to go into Iran.”

“Not at all. I’ve already given you our reasons. It was just easier to start with the others.”

“I remember your President sitting for four hundred or more days while Iranians held American diplomats hostage in Tehran. Were you afraid of them then?”

Kinkaid laughed to himself. “President Carter had a different way of handling these kinds of things than our current President. He’ll go.”

“Very well,” Efraim concluded. “There is someone on the ground within visual range of Alamut. The Sheikh arrived at Alamut yesterday morning, local time. He went directly into the mountain fortress and is currently there.”

“We haven’t seen any foot traffic to that fort at all.”

“Nor will you. They know your satellite schedule. They are also masters of camouflage.”

“How do they know our satellite schedule?”

“Most of them are on the Internet. You type in your latitude and longitude and they tell you when visible satellites will be overhead—”

“But not all of them—”

“And you know of other sites that are trying to do the same for all satellites. There are many people out there who believe intelligence gathering is illegitimate and they try to expose us in whatever way they can. You know all this.”

“I didn’t think the sites had made it that far, that’s all.”

“Maybe they haven’t… Does your young Turk have access to the satellite schedules?”

Kinkaid thought about it, and realized Sami did have access to the overhead imagery schedule. To a great extent, he was the one who had requested it. “Probably.”

Efraim said nothing.

“Where is he likely to be in the fortress? Do you know the structure, how it is organized inside?”

“Yes. We had someone inside—”

“The same person?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Efraim said, cutting off Kinkaid’s inquiry. “The approach is impossible on foot. Tell your people not to send Marines, or airborne troops. They would be able to surround the mountain, and that is all. They could never approach the fortress. The approach is too narrow for even a mule. There are many turns too tight. Only a walking man can approach, and only one at a time and very slowly. And the entire path is guarded by men who hover above you. No one could possibly approach uninvited and live.”

“So we bomb him out.”

“Ah. That is not so easy, my friend. This is the problem that has confounded us. We cannot send anyone in. They would be killed. With certainty. We cannot send our Air Force, because they could only cause a disturbance. Our bombs cannot reach where they need to go.”

“You have the same bombs we have. Are you saying we can’t bomb him out?”

“That is exactly what I am saying. His primary room, a large, round room with a stone floor covered with beautiful Persian rugs, is deep inside the fortress. Below what you can see.”

“Inside the mountain?”

“Yes. We estimate he is one hundred feet under the surface of the mountain.”

“A hundred feet?”

“Yes. Approximately. It could be less or more I suppose, but he is deep inside the mountain.”

Kinkaid was stumped. How do you attack someone a hundred feet under the ground? “That’s deeper than our Strategic Command Headquarters in the mountains of Wyoming.”

“That I wouldn’t know.”

“We can’t drop a nuclear weapon on one man.”

“Obviously.”

“So how does one attack him?”

“That is what we have been unable to figure out.”

“I’ll leave it to the experts. If I give them his location, I have done my job.”

“That is exactly what I said to my people.” Efraim was about to hang up. “Remember what I said, about who knows this information.”

Kinkaid bristled. “I heard you. But you have already killed one of ours.”

“What do you mean?” Efraim asked, concerned.

“Your Air Force went into Lebanon to get the Sheikh, to drop laser bombs on a motorcycle shop.”

“There were many targets in the area—”

“One of which was the motorcycle shop at Dar al Ahmar.”

“Perhaps.”

“When you dropped your bombs to get the Sheikh, one of my men was there to kidnap him. He would have succeeded. Your bombs killed him instead of the Sheikh.”

Efraim didn’t know what to say. He had never heard anything about Americans being killed in the raid. “I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me you had someone there, Joseph? We could have worked together.”

“Yes. Perhaps I should have.”

“It is good that we have talked today. We must talk more. Avoid these things in the future. We must work together to stop this killer. That must be our focus. I’m sorry for your man in Lebanon. If only we had known.” He paused. “But at least one of your planes escorted the strike that killed your man.”

Kinkaid was stunned. He didn’t know what to say. “It’s true?”

“Joseph.”

Kinkaid closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know.”

“They found him?” Woods asked enthusiastically.

Bark nodded his head with a gleam in his eye. “CIA.”

Woods laughed. “The CIA? They couldn’t find their ass with both hands.”

“Maybe somebody told them.”

Woods wanted to know. “So, where is he?”

“That fortress in Iran.”

Wink’s face sobered. “That Alamut place?”

“Yes,” Bark replied. “Northwestern Iran.”

“How far is it?” Woods asked. “Where’s Pritch?”

“CVIC, I suppose.”

Woods looked at Bark. “Are they sure?”

“They’re sure.” Bark handed him the message they had just received. No one else in the squadron had seen it. “They canceled the ground strike into Syria.”

“Must be pretty sure,” Woods acknowledged. “How we going to get him?”

“Long way. We’re the only ones who can get there and put ordnance on target and get back.”

Woods glanced at Wink and saw the look he was hoping for. “We’ll go,” Woods said too quickly.

Bark replied, “You’ve been flying a lot.”

“We can hit it, Skipper. You know that. We will not fail.”

“May not matter.”

“Why?”

He handed him the message. “Guy’s buried underground. A hundred feet. We could drop bombs on top of him all day long, and it wouldn’t touch him. I’m sure we’re not going to send TACAIR into Iran to make a big bang and accomplish nothing.”

“Solution to that’s easy,” Wink said.

They all looked at him.

“Unscheduled sunrise.”

“Like we’re going to nuke him,” Woods said.

“It’d take care of the problem,” Wink said, shrugging.

“We’ll figure something out,” Woods said. “We’ll start the planning, figure out the tanking, how far it is…”

“Don’t assume you’re going—”

Woods and Wink headed out the ready room door immediately and down the starboard passageway toward the CVIC. They stepped over the knee knockers deftly and maintained as quick a pace as they could sustain without running into the sailors coming down the passageway in the other direction. They reached CVIC and went immediately into the large central room. There were several Intelligence Officers and aircrew in the room looking at charts and computer screens. Woods scanned the room quickly for Pritch. She was in the corner, studying a chart on the wall.

“Pritch!” Woods said as they walked over to her. “You hear they found the Sheikh?”

“What?” Pritch said, confused.

Woods handed her the message.

She read it. “Where’d you get this?”

“Just came in. Five minutes ago.”

She memorized the latitude and longitude listed on the message, handed it back to Woods, and looked at the wall chart. “This is the same fortress we were thinking about before,” she said. “Is this the same lat/long?”

Wink shrugged. “Don’t know.”

She put her finger on a mountain ridge in northwestern Iran. “Right here.”

Woods moved closer to the chart and looked over her shoulder. Wink stood on the other side of her. They wanted to know the same thing. Exactly how far it was from their likely launch position. Woods took out his black, government-issue ballpoint pen. He placed it on a longitude line and counted the latitude lines that were each one nautical mile apart all the way along the pen. He picked a spot in the Mediterranean off the coast of Syria, and began moving his pen toward Alamut, counting the pen-lengths to the target. Wink counted on his own. Woods stopped with his pen overlapping the target point. He glanced at Wink.

“Four hundred fifty miles,” Wink said, thinking already of flight profiles, fuel requirements, and ordnance load-out.

Woods replied, still staring at the chart for approach points and the likelihood of a direct, straight-in flight like the one his pen had just completed. “One way.” He measured the distance again.

Wink did likewise.

“You know what this means,” Pritch interrupted.

“What?”

“I don’t see anyway we can do this.”

“Why not?” Wink asked.

“Look at the last paragraph of this message,” she said, handing it to Wink. “They expect him to be seventy-five to a hundred feet underground. We’ll never get him.”

Wink concentrated. “Got to be some way…”

“We’ll never send troops on the ground there to get him. Never happen,” Woods said.

“I don’t know that. It might very well happen,” Wink replied.

“So we’re out of it?” Pritch said, sounding disappointed.

“Not if we catch him on the surface. Make him come out some how.”

“How we going to do that?” Woods asked. “Stick a garden hose down his hole and flush him out? Play ‘whack the gopher’?”

“I don’t hear anything smart coming from you.”

“I’ll think of something,” Woods promised.