SANCTION: A Thriller (4 page)

His National Security Advisor, Edmond Bailey, had broken the news to him three hours earlier. His aides had been scrambling to provide him with a response ever since.

Bailey continued. “We believe that there were nineteen bodies including the professor, from the University.”

The President frowned.

“They are not bodies Edmond, all we need is for the press to learn that my National Security Advisor has begun referring to the hostages as ‘bodies’.”

“Sorry sir.” Bailey said.

Edmond Bailey had been appointed to the position of National Security Advisor because of his wealth of experience in intelligence.

Bailey had served six years aboard the Los Angeles Class–Nuclear Fast Attack Submarine, USS Savannah, as an operations officer before retiring with the Central Intelligence Agency twenty years later. In that time, Bailey had learned the dark truth of just how far America’s enemies were willing to go. This was very different from the vast number of advisors that reported to the President; most of them had either been owed a favor or were simply party loyalists. It was no secret that Bailey and the President agreed on little.

Edmond continued.

“No one has claimed responsibility.”

Usually, whenever a terrorist strike was initiated and successful, groups lined up to attach their name to the free media coverage. In the hours since the attack, no one had raised a single flag for attention.

“We have several teams digging as deep and as fast as they can for answers.”

“Mr. President,” said one of his speechwriters.

A short, stalky brunette walked over to Graham Vanderbilt and handed him a thick sheet of starched White House stationary. The President took it from her and nodded. He took a seat on a gold striped couch and began to read it.

“Thank you Yvonne, but I would scrap this section here,” he said as he washed over a paragraph with his finger.

“And here, I want to add that while we are deeply concerned for the well-being of these students and we will be strongly encouraging neighboring governments to act in favor of finding the perpetrators of this heinous crime, we are not going to retaliate with force whether direct or indirect etcetera, etcetera.” With that the President smiled and handed her back the copy. The aide left the room in a hurry, anxious to get the revisions finished and approved before her boss addressed the Nation in less than an hour.

“With all due respect, Mr. President…,” Bailey started as he unbuttoned the top of his suit jacket and sat on the sofa, opposite the Commander in Chief.

“I always find Edmond, that whenever someone begins a sentence with, ‘with all due respect’ they mean to prepare me for a disrespectful comment.” Vanderbilt stood, walked back to his desk and picked up the telephone receiver. He turned to wait for Bailey’s reply.

Bailey was stunned. The President had made a snap decision that would probably cost the lives of nearly two dozen people. He knew this President, there was no changing his mind. Anything else he said would be a waste of breath.

“Never mind, Mr. President, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my office,” he said through a tight throat. The President gave him his best campaign winning smile and placed the receiver to his ear.

As Edmond Bailey exited the West Wing in front of the south lawn, his heart sank low in his chest. He pictured the American college students at the mercy of the terrorists. He could see their faces, hear their screams. Their young eyes cried out to him. It made him sick.

He looked down at a list of the captured students in his hand as he walked to his parked government sedan. He still drove himself, though the secret service insisted that he be accompanied by a detail and that he drove one of their approved vehicles.

Next to the names of the hostages was a larger list of their known next of kin.

All but one of the names were useless to him. With a red pen in hand Bailey traced circles around the name that stood out in the bunch. He was certain that he’d met him before. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number to his secretary.

“Hi Deidra, I need you to do me a favor,” Bailey said after three rings. Deidra McCormick had worked for the National Security Advisor long before that had become his title.

“Yes sir I’m just making dinner for the family,” Deidra said with a giggle.

“You mean your cat? You need to get out Deidra, a cat is a sorry substitute for a family. I need you to locate an address for DIA agent Brad Ward. I will also need a plane ticket to the closest airport to him. Deidra, I need it yesterday please.”

“Yes sir, was that Ward sir?”

“Yeah, do you know him?” Bailey asked.

“No just making sure I had it right.”

Bailey was turning onto his street by the time his Blackberry began to chime. He glanced down at the illuminated display; it was Deidra.

“Sir, I have the address of Brad Ward for you but you won’t be needing a plane ticket. He lives in Maryland about an hour outside of D.C. In a town called Eldersburg. Should I put you on a flight out of Andrews Air Force Base anyway? I checked, there’s a helicopter still available tonight.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Bailey wrote down the address and thanked his secretary.

Everywhere Saleem’s eyes landed, he saw the remnants of havoc and devastation. The old city was gone, replaced by dilapidated buildings and rusted structural beams that reached out of mangled wreckage to point in every direction. Black streaks marred cinderblock and stone structures, where rockets and tank fired Sabo rounds had burned hot white through the air as their propellants guided them toward their targets. The asphalt roads were still pock marked by the teeth of Israeli tank tracks. There was no population to speak of; it was a forgotten war zone.

Quneitra had been a small, quiet city with a meager gathering of residents but in 1974, it grabbed national headlines when then Egyptian President, Abdel Nasser, had convinced his Jordanian and Syrian counterparts to assemble a military coalition to invade the state of Israel.

Before Nasser and his fellow conspirators could act however, Israel launched a devastating air campaign that immobilized all three countries Air Forces. After the first few days, it had become apparent that the Arab plan had failed.

In Egypt, the Israeli engagement took the IDF almost as far east as the city of Cairo, the army stopping only fifty miles short of the capital. Jordan was dealt several lasting blows, from which they had yet to fully recover. Syria had had an entire civilian city rich in culture and history demolished and subsequently abandoned.

The Syrian government refused to rebuild Quneitra, choosing instead to have a permanent international reminder of what they deemed “Israel’s brutality.”

Saleem thought that bringing the hostages to Quneitra was brilliant. Any attack, counter-attack or show of force would instantly throw Israeli and American aggression into the spotlight; making it both disadvantageous and difficult to respond to Saleem’s plan.

Saleem steered the vehicle to the left and headed south. A mile outside of town, he pulled the truck over to a dirt shoulder and got out. From a trunk in the bed, he produced two small slender tubes, each were notched on one end of the tube body. One of the tubes had a mirrored glass panel embedded in the notch while the other had a small lens. Gone were the low-tech days of a physical trip wire attached to a detonator. The Palestinian forced one of the tubes into the dry hardened soil with the palm of his hand. It would fire a laser to the other tube which would receive and send back the beam via its glass panel. If anything broke the beam it was set up to alert Saleem on his cell phone with a text message that would simply read BREACH. This would allow him to monitor the access point without putting a valuable man on guard duty. He didn’t intend on setting up any munitions here, though the device was capable of it.

Even though Quneitra was one hundred percent Syrian, the United Nations had passed a resolution shortly after the war in ’74 to make the city a, “U.N. Disengagement Observer Force Zone”. Ever since then, a small group of Peace Keeping soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the town’s footprint. Saleem couldn’t be sure yet but he believed they had no clue that he and his men were there.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” he thought to himself as he contemplated the possibility of a confrontation with the platoon sized United Nations element. They were always passive. They wouldn’t do anything even if they became aware of Saleem and his men. Still he knew it was when, not if, the U.N. observers discovered their presence in Quneitra.

B
rad pushed in the clutch and slid the small, leather gear shifter into fourth. The six cylinder engine revved as the car poured into the adjacent lane. Traffic on the D.C. Beltway was horrendous in the morning but the Defense Intelligence agent navigated the highway well enough, his black Porsche accelerating through the broad swooping bends quickly.

Brad Ward had been with the Defense Intelligence Agency for just over seven years. He had started as an analyst in a cramped room on the third floor of a building on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

Back then, Brad had spent his days laboring over an endless stream of reports that, in and of themselves, posed little meaning for the war on terror or the intelligence community but which taken as part of a greater collage of recent history, painted a vibrant and detailed picture of America’s enemies.

Still, for Brad, it wasn’t enough. After two years, the Colorado native had applied and been accepted into the DIA’s Clandestine Service. It was a vastly different world than the one he had begun his career in. In the five years since, he had become somewhat of an Agency legend and a bit of a ghost. People who had known him as an analyst dismissed the stories that trickled back up to their lonely cubicles by way of the water cooler. As with all legends, much of the details were exaggerated if not completely untrue. But if anyone was going to be revered in the Agency’s tiny group of operators, the DIA wanted it to be Brad. He was the poster boy for a successful crossover into the shadowy universe of “Black Bag” operations. He was the epitome of the Service’s unofficial slogan, ‘you could be anybody, anywhere,’ and he had become it, in less than a decade.

Brad had been mulling over his late night visit from the President’s National Security Advisor and the subsequent news of his brother’s kidnapping for hours. It was not the first time he had met Edmond Bailey. Though it was the first time the man had come to his house. It had been almost midnight, not that it mattered. His internal clock was forever skewed by hundreds of flights around the globe and endless shifting between time zones. He hadn’t been asleep.

Something Bailey had said was gnawing at him. “I don’t know what the President is going to do but I wouldn’t expect much.”

Brad pulled up to a guard shack several hundred yards from the entrance to the White House. A tall Marine asked for identification and then retreated back to his shack with Brad’s driver’s license and CAC card in hand. After a couple of minutes the man came back holding a clip board for him to sign. He flagged him past the shack and directed him to another station where two other uniformed men waited with bomb detecting equipment and a calm but alert German shepherd.

The two men showed Brad to another tiny building with a set of chairs he ignored. He observed their inspection through a window in the door. They poured over the European sports car with kid gloves. One passed a convex shaped glass mirror on wheels below the undercarriage while the other inspected the engine beneath the rear deck lid. The dog waited patiently for his turn and once he was up, he was all business. Starting with the front bumper, the dog sniffed and walked the perimeter of the vehicle until he found himself back at the spot where he’d begun.

“Take this and place it on your dashboard. You can park anywhere over here in this area.” The burly Marine said in a flat country accent as he handed Brad a temporary parking pass.

“Have a good day sir.”

Inside the two hundred year old mansion, there were several more layers of security; metal detectors, pat downs and general once overs. Brad had to go through the same procedures that everyone else did even though he had the Nation’s highest security clearance. He had been forced to check his gun at the front gate; he felt naked.

“Right over here sir.”

This time Brad was directed by a civilian in a dark blue striped suit. The President wanted to express his deepest regrets to the families of the hostages as well as assure them that everything that could be done was being done. At least that was what the aide had said on the phone. Brad knew better than to believe that everything was being done. They were going to do whatever was most prudent concerning public opinion.

Brad stepped into a large conference room on the first floor. The room was full; the political hacks wandered about like sharks circling a victim. They were easy to spot amidst the crowd of much less pretentious family members.

“Okay everyone,” Pinstripes said from the center of the room.

A hush fell over the group as they awaited some details.

“In a minute the President will be coming through that door there,” he said, pointing to a set of double doors opposite the entrance Brad had just come through.

“When the President enters the room, please refrain from asking him any questions.” Most of the people Brad assumed to be family of the hostages had faces of shock and concern. Many of them had swollen and tender eyes, obviously induced by hours of crying.

The double doors on the other side of the room swung wide and Graham Vanderbilt stepped in, flanked by a multitude of Secret Service agents, Presidential aides and Military Generals.

“Thank you all for coming.”

The President took center stage in front of a large round table in the middle of the room.

“I know these are trying times. I can’t really begin to imagine what you are going through but I asked you to be here to reassure you that your Government is doing everything in its power to get your sons and daughters back.”