For Honor, page 16
part #17 of Tom Clancy's Op-Center Series
“I have,” he replied.
“Will you provide us with names, units, weapons so that we can see if any of them have come through our airports?”
Ghasemi hesitated. “I’ll do my best.”
Williams reached around and picked up his own tablet, thumbed it from slumber. He handed it to the general.
“It will take time,” Ghasemi said.
“Whatever you can do, and while you think I’d like to ask you—why would anyone have wanted to intimidate Kim?”
January rose suddenly. “Chase, can I see you outside?”
Williams didn’t move and the two or three seconds of stalemate were, to the others, like a world war. The woman suddenly understood why. She quickly added, “While the general thinks.”
“Sure,” Williams said, and left with her.
Out in the hallway, Williams walked her toward Anne’s office. They stepped inside and he shut the door behind them.
“You almost gave him cover in there,” Williams said angrily.
“I understand and I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re all over the map with him,” January said. “Anne told me you’d be questioning him, not fishing.”
“I’m not fishing.”
“No? Is there an actionable connection between this Dr. Farhadi and Parand Ghasemi? Because we know all about TAG and we scanned Ghasemi in Iraq. He was clean.”
“I know your protocols and, no, I don’t think Ghasemi knows Farhadi. Tehran does not have that kind of vertical integration.”
“Then—?”
“I wanted to see him in a new environment,” Williams said.
“The kid in a candy-store gambit?” she said. “I did that at Quantico, Chase! I’m not a novice at this.”
“We’ll get to that in a moment,” Williams replied, causing her to start. “I wanted to know, firsthand, if Ghasemi was going to ask questions, look around—”
“And how do you know he didn’t? We were there ten minutes before—”
“Anne told me,” he interrupted, not bothering to explain about the headshake. “As to the other point, I have a very good idea how Tehran knew where he was.”
“How? He hasn’t been alone and he hasn’t had access to any electronic devices, if that’s where you’re going.”
“He didn’t need any of that,” Williams said. “Two names, January: Abū Khan and Pak Dai. Defectors from ISIS and Kim Jong-un.”
She seemed more mystified than thoughtful.
“Both of them went to embassies last year, Khan in Afghanistan and Dai in Seoul, and both were brought to Quantico.” He nodded in the general direction of the Tank. “We just hacked that from internal communications at State. Took five minutes. Tehran probably already had that information on file. Helluva way to find out our weaknesses, but at least we have.”
January was now openly concerned. “Why do you think they shot at Allen?”
“My guess? It fits Tehran’s SOP. If they’d killed him, it’s international news. A big spotlight on Ghasemi’s defection. This way, it’s still localized. We waste time asking about it, looking into it, trying to find a connection instead of investigating what’s really going on. How many people have we got searching for one man?”
January didn’t have to answer. They both knew the answer: dozens. “So where does this leave us?” she asked. “As important as this is, there are still rules of asylum—”
“There is still a soft target instead of the hard ones,” Williams answered, cutting the lecture short. He’d heard it before many times, in many forms. “I think Ghasemi told us the truth about everything in there. That’s why I asked, to get a baseline reaction. Now we go back and I finish.”
“With what?” January asked.
“The interrogation,” he said. “Then you can take him and go.”
It was less a peace offering than a battle plan, but January accepted by extending her hand toward the door.
They returned to Williams’s office where the director resumed his previous position. January closed the door and stood with her back to it. Williams did not think she was there to bar the general’s escape or to hover protectively. Bankole handed Williams the tablet and nodded: Ghasemi provided an overview of information that he would reasonably be expected to know. There was no point delving deeper, now. Williams glanced at the device and set it on the desk.
“General, I only have only a few more questions for you,” Williams said. “We all believe what you told us in Quantico, that Tehran asked you to come here in search of information. Thank you for being honest about that, too,” he said, indicating the tablet on his desk. “There’s just one thing we haven’t discussed.”
The general was silent, still. He seemed very much alone on the sofa.
“Sir,” Williams said, “when was the last time you saw your daughter?” Everyone in the room, including January, noticed a change come over the man. He had been sitting forward and now he leaned back, crossed a leg, put his hands in his lap. He swallowed.
“It was several weeks before I left,” he answered, his voice characteristically steady.
“How many weeks, General?”
He appeared to be thinking, not hedging. “Three.”
“And when did you last speak with her?”
Ghasemi swallowed again. “Then,” he said. “When I saw her.”
“This was before the video was recorded?” he asked.
Ghasemi nodded.
“The video—was not recorded for your benefit, was it?” Williams asked. “It was made to convince us that you had something to risk by defecting. It was designed to make us trust you.”
“I-I truly do not know. You may be right.”
“What was the last thing your daughter said to you?” Williams pressed.
Ghasemi shook his head slowly as if to say he did not recall.
Williams pushed his butt from the desk and stood. “Think hard, General.”
January took two stops forward, stopping behind the sofa. “Chase—” she cautioned.
Williams ignored her. “General? What was the last thing she said to you?”
The officer looked at Williams. “She—” he said, then stopped again and breathed.
“Back off, Chase!” January said, moving between them.
“Not yet,” Chase said, moving around her to lean on the arm of the sofa. Now she was going to have to push him off. “General—what did Parand say to you?”
“She was the one who asked me to come here.”
That stopped the room.
“On whose behalf?”
“Prosecutor Younesi,” he said. “That … that was true.”
Williams did not move. January came up behind him.
“General, are you all right?” she asked. “Do you want your water?”
“Nursemaid,” Bankole said under his breath.
“What?” January shot him a look.
“Just talking to myself,” Bankole replied.
Williams barely heard the exchange. Anne’s tablet pinged. He didn’t hear that, either.
“Please do not hurt my daughter,” Ghasemi said. It was the first spontaneous remark he had made. Williams believed it was sincere.
“We would very much like that result,” he said noncommittally. “One more question,” Williams said, still looking at Ghasemi. “Why didn’t you go through with the plan, General?”
Ghasemi took a long breath, almost a sob. “I intended to,” he admitted.
“But?” Williams pressed.
Ghasemi looked up at Williams for the first time. “You have to understand, sir. I-I didn’t know what else to do. But I tell you, her eyes were not my daughter’s eyes. They were something, someone else. I did not”—he began, choking now—“I did not see my girl’s soul there. I do not know what happened, how any of this came to be.”
“I think I do,” Anne said.
Once again the room fell silent. She handed Williams her tablet. There was a text from Aaron Bleich flagged MU in red—most urgent. The director read the text, his expression implacable. He looked at January and Ghasemi.
“Our team analyzed the video of Parand,” he said. “They believe the man in the cell with her was Dr. Sadeq Farhadi.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Outpost N64, Anadyr, Russia
July 2, 1:14 P.M.
The site was designated for the latitude on which it was constructed: N64° 44′ 11.9623″. The Kremlin had specifically wanted the name to reference the purpose of the bunker and twin silos: to Khrushchev, the east-west lying line pointed directly at the target, North America.
That was what Bolshakov had heard, anyway. Back then—and today, now that he considered it—gossip was a more reliable form of information than news.
The hatch had been constructed with a spring-action hinge. Turn the key and the two-inch thick iron plate was supposed to rise. But decades of disuse and as many years of freezing had left it unable to move on its own. Yuri removed three large keys from a case and inserted one. Bolshakov heard the lock turn but nothing more. Yuri returned to the car, rummaged through his gear, and returned with a thermos-sized jar. He held the narrow strawlike nozzle over the edge of the plate, pressed a button, and directed a high-powered jet of polyalphaolefin extreme cold-weather synthetic oil around the rim. The lubricant foamed as it seeped through the caked ice and soil frozen in the opening.
“Step back,” Yuri instructed his father, who had put his hands on his knees and was leaning over, watching.
Bolshakov did as he was told. A moment later he heard the hinges squeak and then erupt with a loud metallic scream. The hatch wasn’t open but it was unstuck.
“Some things we make very, very right,” Bolshakov said admiringly.
Yuri returned to the car, stowed the lubricant, and returned with a crowbar and a flashlight. Bolshakov would have brought them all in one trip, but his son obviously had his way of doing things. At least this way he would probably never leave anything behind—which could be a key to survival on GRU missions.
The young man worked the crowbar around the edges to make sure it was entirely free. He inserted the edge, pressed tentatively on the other end, and the hatch came up slightly.
“I’ll use the bar,” Bolshakov said, reaching out.
Yuri handed it to him and in less than a minute, with a maximum of pushing down on the bar and pulling on the lip of the iron plate, the hatch was fully open, the disc locking firmly upright. Yuri swept the interior of the narrow shaft with the flashlight. Other than around the edges, where there were jagged patches of discoloration stretching down three or four inches, the charcoal-gray metal showed little sign of distress.
“Some things we make very, very right,” Bolshakov repeated softly.
Yuri retrieved the key. He put the crowbar back in the car and returned with two large backpacks and a Geiger counter, which he activated. It ticked, but at an acceptable level for where they were. There was a ladder almost beneath Yuri. Handing the Geiger counter and flashlight to his father, he climbed down. When he reached the bottom, the older man passed the two items plus the backpacks down and followed him in. The two men were a snug fit in the shaft, which rose roughly a foot above Yuri’s head.
A submarine-style hatch was located behind where Bolshakov was standing. It had a two-key lock, top and bottom opposite the hinges. The seals appeared undamaged by the elements. Yuri climbed the ladder, his father following him with the light. The top hatch was lowered and relocked, clanging loudly in a way that felt painfully familiar to Bolshakov’s eardrums. Then Yuri came back down and inserted the two other keys in their respective locks.
“I’ll take the lower one,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind—?”
“Of course,” Bolshakov said, and walked to the top lock. He tucked the flashlight under his arm so that both men could see. That, too, was second nature, recorded in muscle memory. He put his fingers on a key he knew well.
“On three,” Yuri said.
He counted it out and the keys were turned, the locks snapping simultaneously. He heard Yuri exhale. Bolshakov stepped back, Yuri rose, and after recovering the keys he turned the round steel handle in the center. It operated a toothed-gear that, when turned, pulled back the bars that secured the door.
Bolshakov had to move to allow the door to swing into the shaft. The dry atmosphere was not like he remembered it, but then the room had been shut, without ventilation, for three decades. Yuri knew where to feel for the light switch. A series of fluorescent lights sputtered to life.
“They weren’t sure these would work,” Yuri said.
“Six to sixty thousand hours of luminous flux,” Bolshakov muttered. “We all read the manual.” He stuck his head in and looked around. “Each of us knew how to operate most everything.”
Yuri stepped over the lip of the doorway and entered the chamber. His father followed. The air was difficult to breathe, like being on another world. He immediately went to a panel along the far wall and pressed a blue button. It activated a fan that was below the vent. It did not turn on.
“I’ll have to fix this,” Bolshakov said, looking up. “Air will get in, but the vent was not protected.”
Yuri was not listening. Accompanied by the gentle tick of the Geiger counter—its low beat reassuring—Yuri had moved to one side of the command center where he stood still and in what Bolshakov regarded as an almost reverent silence. Just before the younger man, its cylindrical white shell and pointed red warhead illuminated by the flashlight, was an upright nuclear missile. It rested, still, in the mobile launcher that had been raised to a fully upright position. After a few moments, he turned the light behind him and shined it on the other nose cone.
“The power to destroy a civilization,” Bolshakov said. He made his way toward his son. “The power to destroy all civilization. Now that we are here, will you tell me why?”
The young man snapped off the flashlight and put the Geiger counter down. He did not answer his father. Instead, he went to the control panel, leaned over a section on the far left that was unrelated to the launch controls, and picked up a telephone receiver that hung from the side. There was no dial; just the ominous black handset. Bolshakov remembered when they had built the facility, patching a cable into the trunk line that ran from Anadyr to Tiksi 1,200 miles to the west on the Laptev Sea, and from there to Norilsk to Syktyvkar to Moscow. Originally, since this was Khrushchev’s private enterprise, the line terminated in the commissar’s office in the Kremlin. The terminus had obviously been rerouted.
“N64 to KA1,” he said, then repeated it.
Bolshakov suspected that KA stood for Khodynka Airfield where the GRU headquarters was located.
Within the heavy walls of the room, sound carried. Bolshakov could dimly hear a voice reply:
“Go ahead.”
“Coordinates correct, objective achieved,” Yuri said. “Please inform Iran that the contents are safe and secure.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Havana, Cuba
July 1, 11:01 P.M.
There was a time, until some sixty years before, that nighttime in Havana would have carried with it an image of bright lights outside the casinos, laughter inside, and the promise of sinful distractions in the rooms above.
After the Revolution, with the flight of the Mafia and American interests, Havana had sunk rapidly into a torpor of unfulfilled dreams—which had been vaguely envisioned to begin with and was utterly unrealized in reality. Castro’s form of socialism, financed by Russia and then Venezuela, propped up the necessary social services while jobs and the quality of life slowly decayed.
Roger McCord had not had time to research the city much, and knew only what had been reported in the history books, news media, and more thoroughly and accurately in the intelligence community white papers. Like Russia writ smaller, it was a nation that subsisted on a black market economy, as a conduit for the drug trade and money laundering, and as a lucrative base of operations for nations intent on penetrating American borders. Planes, ships, and even submarines were constantly shuttling senior planners of terror groups to Florida and the Gulf Coast. Homeland Security knew about most of these trips and, for the most part, let the men and women through; the best way to know their plans and strategies was to watch and listen rather than apprehend.
Go-bag in hand, a phone call to his wife and daughters en route to Reagan International—they were accustomed to his sudden comings and goings, mostly the latter—the intelligence director had been able to make the eight P.M. plane from Reagan International in good time. The nonstop flight was just shy of two hours and forty-five minutes, after which he sat in a small cubicle beside Customs waiting for his paperwork to be validated. The documents had been emailed to Op-Center, printed, and signed en route; that required an extra level of confirmation with the Cuban Embassy in Washington.
While he waited, McCord checked his messages. There was a carefully worded text from “CW,” which had arrived only minutes before:
Tank: Doc used ATM, 10:22 p.m., Centro 59 Bar, Avenida del Puerto
Lively octogenarian, McCord thought.
One reason that McCord was so successful when he was running the MARSOC intelligence operation for the Marines was that he had learned to wait.
As certainly as flawed information could cost lives, hurried efforts to obtain information were equally dangerous. There were times when the risk was necessary, as with an imminent attack or the escape of a high value target; and there were times when even the appearance of haste could cost information and access to that information.
This was one of those times when agitation would raise red flags, cause an even longer delay. He brought up the photo of Dr. Bermejo that Kathleen had found from the Moscow symposium, studied data the Tank had worked up about her height, five-foot-two; likely jewelry and shoe preference—a cross, flats in a formal setting suggested the same for casual; personal habits—enhanced analysis showed skin discoloration on the third finger of her left hand, suggesting a cigarette or cigar smoker; and similar observations.
