Cold Shot (24 page)

Another ten minutes’ climb brought them to the summit. Puerto Cabello appeared to the north, maybe five miles distant. “Try it now,” Jon suggested.

Kyra pulled her phone, turned it on, and stared at the screen. “One bar,” she advised. “Better than none.” She pressed a button. The unit dialed but the call refused to connect the first time, then the second, finally getting through on the third.

“This is Quiver.” The encryption almost hid the anxious tone in Marisa’s voice.

“Quiver, this is Arrowhead.”

“Good to hear from you, Arrowhead. A lot of people are worried about you two.”

“We’re good,” Kyra said. “We also have the intel from the facility and think we’ve identified the cargo.”

“Can you transmit it from your location?”

“Unlikely,” Kyra told her. “The signal here is weak and it was a two-hour hike to reach this position. I’ll be surprised if the signal holds long enough to transmit the whole file.”

“Where’s your comms gear?” Marisa asked.

“Back at the CAVIM site. We didn’t have to time to recover it before we had to bug out.”

“Understood. Can you get me anything useful?” Marisa asked.

“Maybe some screen shots?” Kyra offered the phone to Jon, then dug the iPad out of her satchel.

“What did you find?” Marisa asked.

“Quiver, Sherlock. It’s a nuke,” Jon said. “One warhead, partially disassembled.”

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

Marisa stared at the monitor on her desk as the image from Kyra’s iPad resolved itself slowly in her browser. The CAVIM security camera had been mounted high in the corner of the room, facing toward the center of a large machine shop stocked with drill presses and lathes and other advanced tools she couldn’t identify. In the room’s middle was a large stainless-steel table mounted on wheels. The table was clear except for a conical device, partially assembled, parts lying around it in organized fashion.

Dear God in heaven,
she thought; whether this was the start of a prayer she wasn’t sure.

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

“We’ll still need the full video,” Marisa finally advised after more than a minute’s wait. “Otherwise Avila will just claim that we photoshopped the images.”

“We’re sitting on twenty gigabytes of security footage from the CAVIM site,” Kyra said, taking the phone back from Jon. “Maybe we can load up and head into Puerto Cabello or some other town . . . find an Internet café—”

“I’d advise against that,” Marisa said. “I don’t think a pair of Anglos are going to get a warm welcome in any major city at the moment and I don’t want to risk losing the footage to a street mob.”

“I guess the word got out about the op,” Jon remarked, leaning in to listen on the small speaker.

“Not the op you’re thinking,” Marisa corrected him. “The White House leaked the footage that Arrowhead recorded in the warehouse and CNN put it on the national news. You can thank the national security adviser for the chaos at the facility last night.”

Kyra snarled, too angry to even utter a proper curse. “Any chance we can make it back to the embassy?”

“Don’t even try and that’s an order. The barbarians are at the gates. There’s a mob outside that’s already assaulted one Foreign Service officer and the Marines are looking for a fight. The ambassador is going to order nonessential embassy personnel back to the States if it gets any worse, but the mob isn’t letting anyone out so the DoD is prepping to evacuate everyone by helicopter if the order comes down. The rest of us are banned from leaving the compound. We’re sleeping on couches here. All other AmCits have been advised to leave the country and more than a few tourists are sitting in holding cells. Avila’s people have even arrested some journalists. So I don’t think it’ll end well if you show your faces out there. Just hold your position and check back every four hours. We’ll figure something out. You still have enough gear to last for a while?”

“Yes, but not as much as I’d like,” Kyra said. “I left my pack on the hill and Sherlock torched my truck last night . . . didn’t have time to move much over.”

“We needed a diversion,” Jon offered in his defense.

“I’m in a forgiving mood,” Marisa replied. “His practical joke worked. The locals bit hard. Security sweeps went out from four other facilities less than an hour after he called. We’ve got every one of their covert facilities pegged now. So, nice work,” Marisa said. A few hundred miles away she hoped it made him smile, but wasn’t optimistic.

Her pessimism was justified. Jon just grunted, making Kyra grin. “Sherlock says, ‘You’re welcome.’”

“No, he didn’t,” Marisa replied. “But thank you anyway. We’ll find out a way for you to deliver the intel.”

“We do have another option,” Jon said.

“What’s that?” Marisa asked.

“We can try to recover the comms gear from the CAVIM site,” he said.

“I think that would qualify as one of your ‘stupid ideas,’” Marisa replied after a delay.

“Probably,” he admitted. “But maybe worth the risk if that’s really a nuke.” He tapped the iPad.

“We’ll consider it. Hold your position. We’ll get you out soon.”

CIA Director’s Conference Room

“This is Drescher.” The watch officer set his pen down on the desk to give Mills his full attention.

“Mills, down in Caracas,” the station chief replied. “I’m sending you a file. You’ll want to have some analysts from the Counterproliferation Center go over it first, but you might want to call Kathy Cooke in.”

“She’s in a meeting with—”

“I think you’ll want to pull her out,” Mills interrupted.

Drescher’s eyebrows went up. “What do you have?”

“Arrowhead found something on the security footage. And you need a bigger task force.”

The Oval Office

Drescher’s briefing had been terse and the single image from Kyra’s iPad spoke for itself. A group of analysts from the Counterproliferation Center and two other departments had filled in enough blanks that Cooke felt justified in interrupting the president’s private luncheon with the first lady with a call two minutes later. Rostow’s inclination had been to dismiss her with prejudice but Cooke’s manner had convinced him, hostility notwithstanding, to clear his schedule for the next hour. Cooke obviously disliked him but she was not suicidal, he supposed.

Feldman and Marshall passed into the Oval Office ahead of her and she closed the door behind the last staffer out. “Whatever it is—” Rostow started.

“It’s more important than whatever you were talking about,” Cooke said abruptly. She set her folder on the coffee table, pulled out the stapled packets, and passed them out. “This is the information that our officer recovered from the CAVIM facility night before last.”

Rostow flipped through the pages, then stopped at the still images, marked over with technical notations. He looked up in disbelief. “You’re not serious.”

“I am, I assure you. We’ve had analysts from our Counterproliferation Center and the Office of Weapons Intelligence, Nuclear Proliferation, and Arms Control study the photos along with some engineers from our Directorate of Science and Technology. We’ve also sent it to the Department of Energy for review, but our people concur. That”—Cooke said, pointing at the device in the photograph—“is a nuclear warhead in the final stages of assembly.”

“The last estimate I heard from your people was that the Iranians wouldn’t have nuclear weapons for another few years!” Rostow protested.

“Analysts’ estimates have always varied,” the director of national intelligence corrected him. “That’s been true for us, the Brits, the Israelis, and everyone else with a stake in the game. But given their rate of progression in acquiring equipment and expertise, there was never any question that Iran was going to get there eventually. The only real question was whether they would have the will.”

“So much for our push to open talks with them about easing sanctions,” Feldman muttered. “Better to make them feel like they wouldn’t need nukes than to keep playing these hide-and-seek games.”

“I’d have to disagree with that, sir,” Marshall replied. “Threat equals intent plus capability. Intent can change quickly and without warning, so if you want to make sure the threat is zero, make sure the capability is zero. Letting hostile countries develop capability while hoping their intent stays peaceful is rarely a winning strategy.”

“Defense without offense is the art of losing slowly,” Cooke agreed.

“Enough,” Rostow ordered. “So this isn’t an ammunition factory either?”

“It’s
also
an ammunition factory,” Cooke corrected him. She reached over and turned the binder pages to a second set of images. “The footage shows that they’ve converted just one floor of the building for nuclear assembly. We can’t confirm what they’re doing with the rest of it.”

“How long before that thing is assembled?” Feldman asked.

“It’s difficult to tell from the image, but it could be as little as a couple of days. After that, Ahmadi could load it up and move it out on anything as small as a jeep,” Cooke told him.

“And then we’ll never find the thing again,” Feldman said. “We can’t let that get out of the country. And we sure can’t let them mount it on some missile.”

Rostow nodded. The president’s face had gone white and he looked shaken to Cooke. “Assemble the National Security Council. Meeting in the Situation Room in twenty minutes.” He stared Cooke directly in the eyes. “You know I’m going to release this to the UN.”

“I understand that,” she replied.

Rostow furrowed his brow. “You’re not going to even try to argue with me about it.”

“This is one case where the world really does ‘need to know’ what’s going on,” she said. It was a rare thing to hear that phrase invoked in reference to the general release of information rather than keeping it secret.
Jon would find that ironic,
she thought.

USS
Vicksburg

21°21' North, 68°17' West

150 miles north of the Dominican Republic

By choice, Command Master Chief Petty Officer Amos LeJeune spent most of his time below with the enlisted men, coming up to spend time in the command centers only as necessary. He couldn’t complain about the view, but was happier to see the outside world from the deck where he could feel the sun. But captains lived on the bridge and Riley was no exception. The commanding officer stood facing a monitor that showed
Vicksburg
’s current position in the western Atlantic.

LeJeune approached the captain and took the offered printout. The time stamp on the message fell within the past hour. “We’re being chopped to the Fourth Fleet.”

“Really? And who else is joining our little party?”

“
Harry Truman,
for starters,” Riley told him. “Fifteen ships total.”

“That’s a lot of metal to be moving around the ocean. Did the rear admiral care to explain why we’ll be delaying our arrival at home?”

“He did,” Riley said, surprising the petty officer. “You saw the news last night?”

“That story out of Venezuela?” LeJeune nodded. “It’s all the news networks have been playing all day.”

“The president’s just ordered a blockade. I guess he doesn’t want that Iranian gentleman to leave.” Riley scrolled the electronic map southwest until it stopped over a small point of Venezuela’s northern coast. “We’re assigned here, southeast of Curaçao. Half the fleet will be in place by tonight. We’ll be one of the last to show for the party, on station by tomorrow night. I have no idea how long we’ll be here.”

“Mighty close to Aruba,” LeJeune noted. “A shame we won’t be making any port calls.”

“I think most of the crew would just settle for home,” Riley said.

“Most of the crew has never been to Aruba,” LeJeune countered. “I’ll let ’em know. ‘Ours to do and die.’”

“Very well.”

LeJeune handed the orders back to the captain and left the bridge to the officers.

DAY SEVEN

CIA Director’s Conference Room

“Who’s Marcus Holland?” the courier asked from the doorway. Drescher pointed to the far corner where the analyst was sitting and the courier made her way around the table, ogling the mass of papers covering the entire space as she did. “Delivery from Treasury,” she said.

Holland snatched the office envelope from her fingers, tore it open, and a CD in a jewel case slid out into his hand. “Yeah, baby,” he said. He looked up at the courier. “Thanks.” He swiveled in his chair, pulling the disc out as he turned, then grabbed a laptop from the conference table and slid the CD into the tray. The laptop considered the disc for several seconds, then opened a file window.

Drescher caught the young man by surprise as he leaned over the analyst’s shoulder. “Any joy?” he asked.

“Treasury actually coughed up the data. That’s something. Usually getting stuff like this takes a couple of months. The director must have pulled out the
big
machete to go through the red tape,” Holland said. “Ask me again in a few hours.”

UN Security Council

United Nations Conference Building

New York, New York

Cooke had never set foot in the Security Council chamber. No CIA director had since George Tenet had taken a seat behind Colin Powell, lending his authority to the case that Saddam was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence failures revealed after that had made any intelligence chief a liability to have in this room. But Cooke had understood Rostow’s reason for ordering her attendance the moment he’d called. He would make the presentation and, if events to come turned out to his liking, he would take the glory. If they didn’t, her presence behind him would give him cover. The media would assume she had misled the president of the United States and she’d have to resign in disgrace, which wouldn’t bother Rostow at all.

The council chamber wasn’t the largest auditorium she’d sat in, only a few hundred feet square. Drescher had told her that the Norwegians had designed and paid for it. She looked behind the central table and studied the Per Krohg mural on the wall that overlooked the circular table—a phoenix rising from the ashes. The artist had meant it to depict the rise of peace in the aftermath of the Second World War.
If that’s true,
that bird is still having a terrible time trying to climb out of the fire,
she thought.

The U.S. seat at the circular table was at the one o’clock position and Rostow was already there, talking to the British prime minister, who was the council president this month. Feldman took his place next to Cooke, the secretary of state and ambassador to the UN both to the left of him. The chamber was full to capacity, with some functionaries crowding at the doors and sitting in the aisles. The room was large enough to seat a few hundred and often the chairs were not all filled, but all of the players at the table were heads of state today. The world had noticed the U.S. Navy moving to cut Venezuela off from the rest of the planet, which had lent credence to the rumor that Rostow was going to present something disturbing to the council. Cooke wondered whether Feldman had passed that tidbit to the
Washington Post
or if Rostow had done it personally.

The British prime minister pounded his gavel against the table and the room went silent. “I should like to inform the council that I have received a letter from the representative of Venezuela, in which he advises that the head of state of the Bolivarian Republic has declined to attend the discussion of the item on the council’s agenda.”

The audience muttered at that unwelcome piece of news and Cooke heard Feldman cursing under his unpleasant breath. Rostow turned back and looked at Cooke, frustrated. She held his gaze, returned his stare, and gently shook her head.
I guess Avila’s not following the plan,
she thought.
Hard to have an Adlai Stevenson moment when Zorin doesn’t show up.
She held herself still in her seat, knowing the news cameras in the gallery could see her sitting behind Rostow, but she searched the room.
Avila’s not here. His ambassador isn’t here.
She searched the room and saw none of the faces she expected.
The Iranians aren’t here,
she realized.

“The Security Council will now begin its consideration of the item on its agenda,” the UK prime minister said. “The purpose of this meeting is to hear a presentation by the United States. I call on His Excellency Mr. Daniel Rostow, president of the United States of America.”

Rostow leaned forward in his seat and opened the leather binder on the table before him. “Mr. President, members of the council, honored guests, I would like to begin by expressing my thanks for the special effort that each of you made to be here today,” he began. “My purpose now is to share with you some disturbing information the United States has obtained regarding a conspiracy between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran to traffic in illegal nuclear materials in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to which both countries are signatories, and in violation of sanctions that this council has imposed on the latter country.”

The silence in the room died in an instant, forcing Rostow to stop as cries and yells rent the air. A hundred different conversations mixed with excited utterances and the UK prime minister had to gavel the room back to attention.

Rostow nodded toward the council chairman, then started again. “The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are United States sources and some are those of other countries. Some of the sources are technical, such as photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what President Avila and his Iranian counterpart are doing. To protect our intelligence sources and methods, I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you is deeply troubling.”

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

“But why would the Iranians build their nukes
here
?” Kyra asked out loud. “It would be a lot easier to maintain security on their home soil.” She stuffed the last of her garbage into the MRE pouch and tossed it into a garbage hole they’d dug.

“I could only guess.”

“Your guesses are usually pretty good.”

“Maybe they aren’t building them in Iran because everyone is looking for them in Iran. Nobody was looking for them here,” he said. Jon cleaned out the last of his dessert pouch while he thought. “Chávez was already courting Iran before the September eleventh attacks. Then he was ousted for a few days in a coup in 2002 and the U.S. didn’t lift a finger. After that he probably thought that he was an unwritten charter member of the ‘axis of evil,’ so he started making alliances with every anti-U.S. ally who would talk to him . . . Iran, Libya, Syria. But Chávez was smart enough to see that he was only three hours away from the U.S., so maybe he figured he needed a little insurance after we invaded Iraq and Gaddafi decided to come clean on Libya’s WMD program. The threat of chemical weapons hadn’t deterred us from taking down Saddam and biological weapons are big bags of hurt to manufacture and maintain, not to mention you can’t control their spread after release. That left nukes.”

Jon cleaned up the remnants of his breakfast and tossed it into the hole. “Iran had the same problem. There were rumors they had a covert weapons program called the ‘Green Salt Project’ since the days of Khomeni, trying to get uranium hexafluoride for a bomb, and they’d gotten some help from AQ Khan. But after September eleventh the risks of getting caught building one went way up and their facilities were getting outed. Ahmadi could bring Iran’s nuclear production infrastructure to the table and Chávez had uranium deposits in the Roraima Basin. Iran had the means and Venezuela had raw materials. Avila’s people mine and ship uranium to Tehran, where it’s enriched, then Avila ships the fissile material back here for final assembly where no one is looking. While we’re looking all over Iran for nuclear facilities, Avila builds them in our backyard. No aspiring nuclear power has ever built its infrastructure outside its own country, so no one considered the possibility until you took that video.”

UN Security Council

“I hesitate to reveal this information to you, but I believe that circumstances compel it and there is historical precedent of a U.S. president declassifying even the most highly sensitive information during a crisis of an exceptional nature,” Rostow said. The crowd shifted in response and the president hesitated, playing to the group. “In the first video you saw two days ago, a U.S. operative penetrated a Venezuelan warehouse and witnessed officials from both countries colluding to commit murder. One of those men was Dr. Hossein Ahmadi, who our intelligence collection confirms is a nuclear proliferator. We will make some of this intelligence available to the members of the council immediately after this session. Dr. Ahmadi’s appearance raised fears that his presence on Venezuelan soil was a sign of a larger operation. I must report to this body now that those fears are confirmed. Less than twenty-four hours ago, another highly sensitive U.S. operation recovered video footage from a Venezuelan facility near the town of Puerto Cabello, where Dr. Ahmadi’s presence was also recorded. The facility is an ammunition factory jointly constructed in 2007 by both the Venezuelan and Iranian governments. The still photograph you see behind me is taken from that video, which was filmed by the facility’s own security cameras.”

The lights in the room dimmed. Rostow turned and pointed at the graphic that appeared on the enormous screen behind him above the table—the single frame of the video, the warhead in pieces, with labels overlaying the image, identifying the parts.

“Our analysts have confirmed that the device depicted in the image is, in fact, a nuclear warhead of advanced design.”

The crowd gasped and erupted again. Cooke looked at each of the permanent council members in turn. They were hard to see, the light in the room mostly coming from the image hovering above the council table and the small lights above the individual seats. The French and British were silent, slack-jawed, staring at the screen. The Chinese delegates were quietly talking. The lone Russian, Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, was staring down, his eyes closed as he listened to the translation through his headset. Then he jerked upright, eyes open now, and he twisted his head to look up at the photograph.

I guess the translator finally caught up,
she thought.

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

Jon stopped talking as a helicopter butchered the air in the distance with a low, throbbing cry, rising over one of the lower hills to the west, then riding down the tree cover to the valley. It was ten kilometers from their position, by his estimate. It turned north and headed for the coast.

“If that’s true, they’d need more than one facility,” Kyra said. The woman was lying flat on her back, staring at the sky. She set down the Glock that she’d pulled from her holster at the sound of the aircraft. “Puerto Cabello is a long way from the Roraima Basin. I can’t imagine they’d want to move illegal uranium a few thousand miles overland to ship it out from here.” She paused and then she laughed. “That’s why you told Mari to warn other teams on an unsecured phone.”

Jon nodded. “I was hoping the SEBIN would intercept the call and send out security sweeps from any other illegal facilities. When they did, they gave up every covert facility in the country.”

UN Security Council

It took the Security Council chairman more than a minute to finally restore order. “I’m sure that everyone here is asking how these two countries managed to accomplish this undetected. Our intelligence agencies have been working to piece the entire conspiracy together and the time line is telling,” Rostow said when the crowd finally hushed to let him speak. Cooke turned her attention to the gallery. Half the crowd was focused on Rostow, the other half looking down, tapping on their smartphones.
Journalists,
she realized.
The story is already out.

The picture on the screen behind the council changed to show a map of Avila’s country, with a half-dozen points marked, satellite photos of each location inset to show factories and facilities. “In 2007, these two nations created a joint enterprise named VenIran that began a series of construction projects on Venezuelan soil. One of these includes the ammunition factory near Puerto Cabello, where the photo I just showed you was taken. Another is a ‘tractor factory’ in Ciudad Bolívar along the Orinoco River. A cement factory in Monagas. A car assembly plant in Aragua. All of these were revealed as part of the nuclear infrastructure during the operation. I cannot reveal to you how this was accomplished, as the sources and methods involved are far too complex and sensitive.”

Thank heaven for small favors,
Cooke thought. For once she was grateful that the man was a shameless liar.

“With those and other facilities in place, in November 2008, both countries signed a secret ‘science and technology’ agreement formalizing cooperation ‘in the field of nuclear technology,’” Rostow went on. “That same month, the Iranian company Impasco received a ‘gold mine’ concession in the heart of the Roraima Basin in the southeastern state of Bolívar, which sits along the Venezuela-Guyana border. I would suggest that if you think it’s gold they’re after, you should think again.”

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

“So you were just making things up as you went along?” Kyra asked.

“Something like that,” Jon admitted. “I had no idea whether it would work, but I figured if your op was blown, there would be no reason not to try. But if Mari’s right, we should have a map of their nuclear infrastructure now. It’ll take a while to figure out what each facility is for; the CAVIM chemical plant has got to be the hub . . .” Jon trailed off.

“What?” Kyra asked. She’d seen the man cut himself off in midsentence before. The tic usually heralded some unpleasant conclusion.

“The ammunition factory . . . part of the facility is a chemical plant.”