And Into the Fire Page 4

  “Maybe not,” Jules said. “But I can get you enough shit to expose Shaiq and maybe even haul him into court.”

  “Never happen,” Jennings said. “He’s wired too tight. Right now he owns the White House, half of Congress, all the lobbyists, and our paper.”

  “I’m not letting this slide,” Jules said.

  “You have to, Jules,” Jennings said. “This one’s a bridge too far. I can’t cover for you this time. You’ll come back bloodied.”

  The waiter brought them fresh unrequested drinks and Jennings clinked Jules’s glass.

  “How’d you feel when Shaiq said he’d like to whip you into shape?” Jennings asked.

  “It made my flesh crawl.”

  “Just watch your six. He’s mean enough to kill a rock.”

  “Tell him to watch out for me.”

  “Really?” Jennings said. “How many billions are you worth?”

  Jules leaned forward till she and Jennings were eye to eye. “Doesn’t matter. I got the power of the press behind me, bucko, and I’m busting that bitch down to sucking eggs.”

  7

  “For $20 million I’ll nuke you.”

  —Hasad ibn Ghazi

  Hasad drove the big enclosed two-ton pickup truck with the PAEC logo on the sides up the highway toward Islamabad. Mahmud sat next to him; the other team members sat in the truck on the canisters of HEU.

  “I can’t believe we pulled it off,” Hasad said.

  Mahmud frowned elaborately, which only heightened Hasad’s jubilation.

  “Look on the bright side, my friend,” Hasad said. “Everyone loves heist films, and we just pulled off the heist of the century. Of the millennium. Hollywood will make movies about us. We’ll be superstars!”

  “Yes? And how would that movie end?” Mahmud asked gloomily. “Hellfire and apocalypse?”

  “Allahu A’lam,” Hasad said with a wry smile. Allah knows best.

  “Do not mock the one true God,” Mahmud said.

  “Who’s mocking Him?” Hasad asked. “Are you not doing all this in Allah’s name?”

  “Laa,” Mahmud said. “Astugh-fer-Allah.” Yes, may He forgive me.

  “Then why so glum?” Hasad asked.

  Mahmud let out a long heavy sigh. “You know what really gets me?”

  “How easy it was?” Hasad asked.

  “The facility was hardly secured at all,” Mahmud said, nodding.

  * * *

  No, it hadn’t been difficult. After they had loaded the cans onto the two dollies and thrown the tarps over them, they’d simply reloaded the tray with the phony, weighted cans containing the counterfeit rings and closed the storage hole. Hasad and his crew then dragged the real HEU cans out to the loading dock. Hasad backed a PAEC truck up to the dock, attached a ramp, and they pulled the dollies onto the truck bed.

  At one point, a burly, bearded dock foreman in gray dirty coveralls wanted to know who they were. Mahmud had flashed his ID at the man. Under his name, the guard at the Visitors Center had mistakenly typed “Director of the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission.”

  The foreman stared at him, unsure.

  “Just wrapping up,” Mahmud said.

  Standing in front of the foreman, Mahmud then keyed the plant supervisor’s personal number into his cell phone. When the supervisor came on, Mahmud put him on speakerphone and said:

  “The inspection’s over. You will be notified of our findings in a month. I remind you that this operation is classified. Revealing anything about this operation carries a prison sentence of up to thirty years at Dadu Prison in Sindh.”

  Overhearing the conversation, the dock foreman’s face whitened. He did not know whom he feared more: Mahmud or his supervisor.

  He decided it was Mahmud.

  When the men climbed into the truck and took off, Hasad watched the foreman in his side mirror heave a desperate sigh of relief.

  * * *

  Hasad pulled off the highway onto a dry, deserted road. After a couple miles, he turned left, then another left. Next he cut across open country for a half mile. Parking behind a hill and a thick stand of desert poplar, which gave the truck ample cover, the entire team climbed down from the truck.

  “What are we doing?” Mahmud said.

  “We’re going to bury the HEU drums.”

  He and Hamzi began lining cans up on the end of the truck bed. Afterward, Hasad jumped down and grabbed a can off the edge of the truck bed. The other men followed suit, the stronger men grabbing two.

  Hasad then led them a hundred or so feet to the base of a hill.

  “You can put down the cans,” Hasad said.

  He then led them to two dug holes, six feet by six feet and four feet deep, a shovel sticking in each of the two piles of excavated dirt.

  “We have to put five cans into one hole,” Hasad said, “five into the other, spreading them out. The HEU gives off alpha particles, which, if they hit a fellow HEU ring, can cause it to go critical. If they’re too close for too long, you can get a chain reaction. So put a lot of dirt between the cans.”

  “Whatever you say,” Hamzi said. “I just want to get rid of this shit.”

  Hasad quietly swung his silenced MP7 crosswise out from under his suit coat, pushed the lever to full auto, and emptied the forty-round magazine into the men, sparing only Mahmud and Hamzi. He then went from man to man putting a single round into their heads with his pistol.

  “Don’t worry, my friends,” Hasad said to Mahmud and Hamzi, smiling. “I trust you. Without you, there wouldn’t have been any operation. And Hamzi, you will be needed for other operations. Now let’s get these canisters and bodies into those holes over there.”

  “The HEU cans won’t go critical in a single hole?”

  “They didn’t go critical in that tube vault, and they were squeezed into those holes like sardines.”

  “But—”

  “I lied, Mahmud. Let’s start with the bodies.”

  While Mahmud grabbed a corpse under the armpits and dragged him toward the first hole, Hasad slipped an encrypted satellite phone out of his pocket and took two quick photos, one of the HEU cans, one of the five dead men, their bloody bodies skewed at grotesque angles. Speed-dialing a number—which connected him to an automatic rerouter in Dubai, then another in Islamabad—he transmitted the photos to his case officer, who was an ISI colonel. The transmission was end-to-end encrypted, so even if an intelligence service intercepted it, all they would get would be undecipherable nonsense symbols and syllables. Within seconds, a text appeared on his screen.

  Done.

  Hasad routed another number, by way of Mexico City, to his banker in the Caymans, transmitting the text:

  The item?

  Twenty long seconds later another text appeared on his screen.

  Twenty eagles have landed.

  So that was that—$20 million. Half of what was owed him. Where was the other half? What the hell was General Jari doing?

  You better watch yourself, General. For $20 million I’ll nuke you.

  Keeping his face and attitude impassive, Hasad grabbed a shovel and joined Mahmud and Hamzi in covering up the cans and the bodies.

  An hour later they had buried the men and the cans and were back in the truck and on the highway.

  Almost immediately sirens were wailing, lights flashing behind them.

  In his side mirror, Hasad saw a caravan of police cars and military vehicles coming at them at high speed.

  “They’re coming for us!” Mahmud said, his face frantic.

  “Not to worry,” Hasad said. “Check your side mirror.”

  A dozen police vehicles were turning off onto a side road leading up to the A. Q. Khan Nuclear Power Plant, which was located twenty miles up the road from the MAK HEU processing plant. The MAK was where they had pulled off their bomb-fuel heist.

  At the far end of the side road, Mahmud could now see the distant specter of levitating fireballs and billowing smoke.

  “Someone’s bl
own the A. Q. Khan Nuclear Power Plant to hell and gone,” Hasad said.

  “But why?” Mahmud asked, his voice rising.

  “Maybe they don’t like nuclear power,” Hasad joked.

  “But what happened?” Mahmud was now close to hysteria.

  “I personally think,” Hasad said with an insolent grin, “a bunch of tree-hugging Greenpeacers burned it to the ground.”

  “I’m the deputy director of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission,” Mahmud shouted. “I have a right to know.”

  “I don’t know,” Hasad said, “but I think it has something to do with four Humvees, a chain gun, twenty drums of Semtex, and a whole shitload of TOW missiles.”

  Hasad pulled over so they could watch the black flaming smoke rise high above what was once the A. Q. Khan Nuclear Power Plant.

  PART II

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.…

  —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  1

  The A. Q. Khan Nuclear Power Plant was now one colossal conflagration.

  Elena Moreno, head of the CIA’s Pakistan desk, was already seated in the Langley conference room. Simply attired in a gray suit and white blouse, she studied her colleagues as they entered. They seated themselves, one by one, in their leather padded, swivel recliner armchairs. In their private lives, they had all, except General Hagberg, been titans of industry. Consequently, their wardrobe reflected their wealth, status, and power. An old friend—a high-priced couturier—had taught Elena to recognize expensive men’s apparel. President George Caldwell was decked out in a blue pin-striped Armani; CIA Director William Conrad favored a tan Dior Homme; and NSA Director Charles Carmony entered in what appeared to be a five-figure bespoke silk suit, custom tailored on Savile Row. A gold, diamond-studded Bvlgari glittered on Carmony’s wrist. Conrad sported a Movado Sapphire, Caldwell a TAG Heuer. None of their white silk shirts retailed for under a grand, which she also estimated to be the bottom-line price point on their solid-color silk neckwear. She couldn’t see the men’s shoes, but she knew from experience they were Gucci, Zegna, Ralph Lauren, or Dior.

  * * *

  The secretary of defense, General David “Hurricane” Hagberg, was the exception, contenting himself with an army uniform.

  From Elena’s point of view, they were all overpaid corporate confidence men with thinning hair and expanding waistlines, lobbyists in officials’ clothing, shilling for Wall Street predators, health care con artists, oil industry behemoths, and arms-dealing death pimps. These kinds of people had been responsible for the endless wars in Southeast Asia and the Mideast and were frying the planet alive in a horrendous carbon-fueled climate change holocaust, all the while claiming fealty to God, flag, hostile takeovers, and the American Way. Elena Moreno doubted if any of the men had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives or—except for the general—had ever heard a shot fired in anger. They hadn’t grown up, as she had, in a wind-scoured West Texas three-room desert shack, living with her old man on little more than fried dough, spit-roasted javelina, mesquite beans, and mule piss drunk out of cow tracks.

  Privately she disparaged her colleagues as “mean-spirited, money-fucking whores.”

  “Refreshments anyone?” President Caldwell asked, treating them all to his best campaign-rally smile.

  Elena studiously ignored the silver platters of pastries, bagels, croissants, and assorted donuts, all of which her colleagues were eagerly hoeing into. She also ignored the sugar and Splenda dishes, the sterling silver cream pitchers, glass carafes of iced orange juice, and bottles of Perrier alongside the silver ice bucket and crystal goblets. Instead she helped herself to one of the sterling silver Thermoses and filled her black White House coffee mug, emblazoned with the presidential shield.

  “Elena,” President Caldwell said, calling the meeting to order, “you may begin.”

  She jumped right in. “As you may know, terrorist attacks in Pakistan are escalating. A month ago we reported that a dozen Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan—otherwise known as the TTP—entered and blew up parts of a Wah Cantonment facility, a nuclear ordnance plant. They killed fifty-nine people and wounded seventy. We now believe those TTP terrorists were operating in conjunction with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which we refer to as ISIS. Later the same organizations, again in combination, attacked Pakistan’s Kamra air base—a nuclear weapons storage facility. In one of their most daring and meticulously organized raids, these black-clad terrorists stormed and occupied the Masroor nuclear weapons storage site near Karachi. They not only knew the locations of the base’s surveillance cameras, they also knew how to neutralize them. In this operation, fifteen attackers killed eighteen military personnel and wounded sixteen. They also set fire to several state-of-the-art warplanes with rocket-propelled grenades. (Note to reader: The previous attacks are based on real nuclear terrorist strikes in Pakistan over the last ten years.)

  “ISIS is now the best organized and most heavily funded group we have ever encountered. Thanks to a recent infusion of Saudi petrodollars, we estimate its current worth at $1 billion, and we have evidence that it sent key advisors, soldiers, weapons, and money to Pakistan’s TTP. E-mail intercepts and NSA chatter report that this new terrorist amalgam is bent on acquiring several Hiroshima-style terrorist nukes and detonating them in the U.S. This new coalition is so sophisticated and well financed that such reports can no longer be dismissed or ignored.”

  “If ISIS is so dangerous and fanatical,” NSA Director Carmony said, shaking his head, “TTP would be scared to death of them. ISIS would swallow them up whole.”

  “A good point,” CIA Director Conrad said. “ISIS is quite capable of murdering the TTP leadership and taking over the organization themselves.”

  “Understood,” Elena said, “but the TTP had never seen that much hard currency before, and in the end, my sources believe, they could not say no to the money—over $1 billion in cash and gold bullion along with matching funds from a group of Saudi princes, all of it to be devoted to nuclear assaults on the U.S. We are told the payment was only recently received.”

  “In other words, ISIS, Pakistan’s ISI, and the Saudis have gone into the nuclear terrorism business,” General Hagberg said.

  “Yes, and the first shot over the bow has sounded—a warm-up exercise, a practice drill, foreshadowing of terrorist attacks to come. This one, as you have just heard, took place in Pakistan.” Her phone vibrated. Glancing at it, Elena said, “Our digital people have cut the video together. Here it is.”

  Elena began streaming it from her computer onto the one-hundred-inch flat-screen TV that hung on the wall.

  “This assault ended forty-five minutes ago,” Elena said. “It includes satellite and ground-level footage. A lot of it also came from the terrorists themselves via YouTube. This attack is on the A. Q. Khan Nuclear Power Plant just east of Jalalabad along the banks of the Indus River.

  “Here is satellite footage of the ISIS/TTP terrorists in four U.S. Humvees—which they took off the American-equipped Iraqi Army—coming up the road to the A. Q. Khan Nuclear Plant. Every inch of these Humvees is shielded with thick, heavy, Frag Kit 6 antiexplosive armor.”

  “We gave those guys nothing but the best,” General Hagberg said bitterly.

  “Here you see them at the main gate,” Elena continued. “There, the guards—dressed in Afghan National Army desert fatigues—are checking their documents, license plates, and vehicle tags. Notice here, however, the team leader—wearing the uniform of a Pakistani army colonel—steps out of the vehicle. According to plant protocol, one of the guards should be telling him and his men to surrender their ordnance, saying they’ll be held at the security center for safekeeping. You see the colonel here, nodding his head, seeming to acquiesce, but instead he draws a silenced semiautomatic pistol holstered to his thigh and shoots all four guards in the head. The colonel climbs back into the lead Humvee, and they crash through the sally port, smashing the gates of the two other wire-topped cyclon
e fences. Their arrival is dramatic enough to alert the other guards, who are now coming at them in five of the Pakistan Army’s finest Talha armored personnel carriers, or APCs. All-terrain, twelve and a half tons, with a thirteen-man crew and a 12.7mm machine gun on the roof, it’s a good machine.” Elena froze the frame and went in tight. “You’ll see each APC has vehicle armor. They’re ready for war. But can a Talha APC stand up to four fully tricked-out ISIS/TTP Humvees?” Elena asked. Cutting back to the Humvees, she resumed the action. “Note the rooftop ordnance on Humvee number one.”

  “A 25mm Bushmaster chain gun,” General Hagberg said. “Each bullet is an inch in diameter—twice the size of the Pakistani gun—and fires almost three and a half rounds per second. It chambers those rounds via a high-speed electric motor with a roller chain driving the bolt back and forth. It can kill anything two miles away and more.”

  “What other ordnance are we looking at, General, on the other three Humvees?” Elena said.

  “On top of the Humvees, we have tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles—BGM-71 TOWs—the finest tank killers ever made, capable of penetrating two feet of titanium,” the general recited mechanically.

  The eight fighting vehicles began fanning out.

  “Now the Humvees’ CROWS firing systems are swinging the long Bushmaster barrels around. The Humvee-mounted TOWs are lining up and—and—and—”

  One minute—and more than 150 rounds later—five Talhas exploded into smoking red-orange fireballs, which quickly merged into a single scintillating globe of incandescent flame. The blazing sphere ascended over the wreckage like a gaudy god rising up out of hell.

  “Notice those guys never used their TOWs,” Elena said.

  “They knew they had them with that chain gun,” General Hagberg said. “Still that’s some ballsy tank warfare they just showed us.”

  “Maybe they were saving the TOWs for something more important,” Elena said cryptically.

  Whatever the case, the opposition was in retreat. Over two dozen soldiers, several jeep-like Nanjing troop carriers, and a half dozen other High Mobility Vehicles were scattering in all directions, most of them racing toward the gate.