Spy (17 page)

Suddenly, the guy shuddered. His eyelids fluttered and his lips started moving, too, but nothing was coming out. Stoke bent down, but all he could hear was garbled Spanish.

“Luis,” Stoke said, “put your ear down here and tell me what this guy is saying,”

Luis leaned over and listened for a few seconds, a puzzled look on his face.

“He says ‘Thank you.’ ”

“What?”

“Thank you very much, that’s what he’s saying.”

“That’s a first,” Stoke said.

K
illing Americans en masse,” Dr. Abu Musab al Khan told Muhammad Top, “will be mere child’s play. I am assuming, based on endless reports and assertions by you, that all our military assets are firmly in place and that the phalanxes soon to be moving up into the Mexican mountain range have the ability to achieve this objective.”

“Yes.”

“All is in readiness with the convoy?” he asked, stroking his beard. “Our friend in Caracas is very nervous.”

Muhammad Top had been impatiently awaiting this question since Dr. Khan’s arrival the day before.

“Yes. The assets are in place north of the border. Mexican units, loyal to our cause, await your orders as to when to release the vehicles. As you will soon see, we are fully prepared to strike on all fronts, Dr. Khan,” Top said, locking his eyes on Khan’s. “God willing.”

“
Inshallah.
I am looking at the clock above the monitor. Some kind of countdown, I presume?”

“Yes, Doctor. The countdown was initiated this morning.”

Top made sure his eye contact with the diminutive scientist was solid for good reason. Khan was now the second most powerful man in the global Islamic terrorist movement. He had known this man for many years. He knew that those shrewd black eyes didn’t just see you, they penetrated your very soul.

“I bring greetings and prayers for your success from on high.”

“Please assure the sheikh I am prepared to do my sacred duty. The aggressors will trouble us no more after the Day of Reckoning.”

Top tried desperately to conceal his surprise at Khan’s mention of Osama. No one in the terrorist community was sure whether or not the sheikh was even alive. A recent tape had been played on al-Jazeerah, but there were doubts as to its authenticity.

The true leader of the movement, the almost mythical prince Osama, had not been actually seen, publicly or privately, in nearly three years. Not since December of 2004, when he had released his last video. He called for his jihadist warriors to strike Persian Gulf oil supplies and warned the apostate House of Saud that they risked a popular uprising. Then he disappeared. Now, rumor had it, Khan was preparing to succeed the long silent leader.

The Western media were strangely silent too. The media simply didn’t know what had happened to the man who’d ignited the worldwide Islamic jihad. They didn’t know if the much-vaunted prince of darkness had simply gone deeper into hiding as the American troops closed in on him; or, perhaps, he had simply died. It was still entirely possible he was only lying low, lulling the West into a false sense of complacency while planning some great Armageddon.

In truth, even so important a figure in the global movement as Muhammad Top did not know the answer to that puzzle. But he knew that it was Abu Musab al Khan who had recently stepped into the media limelight as the “brains” of the organization. If Khan didn’t hold the reins of power, surely he was in the business of seizing them. Top knew that his own success in this current initiative would consolidate Khan’s position in the Arab world.

And, so did his esteemed guest.

In any case, Khan was not a man to be trifled with. He was clearly capable of running the movement’s global terror operations. Besides, it was common knowledge that Dr. Khan had personally eviscerated men on the spot for failing his particular kind of eye test. It was said that Khan secreted a viciously curved scimitar within the folds of his robes for just such a purpose.

For all of Top’s judicious planning, his guest had arrived two hours late. He had been delayed by bad weather, a storm front moving over Buenos Aires. After a good deal of hand-wringing over arrangements to receive them, the man had finally arrived at the jungle compound.

After his arrival at the landing strip, and travel to the central village, Top escorted him to his temporary guest quarters. He enjoyed the man’s reaction as they climbed into a sturdy woven basket to be lofted upward to the large two-story guesthouse situated some two hundred feet up in the treetops. Shortly afterward, the new arrival had descended and begun a guided tour of the bustling complex.

Top had decided to start the tour with the subterranean Command and Communication center secreted in the very heart of his compound. Even Dr. Khan could not fail to be impressed by all the stunning long-distance warfare technology he would see this day. Already Top could sense that Khan was secretly delighted with the Swiss-clock workings and precision perfection of the teeming terrorist enclave.

The two men were now standing before an array of surveillance monitors, their upturned faces bathed in incandescent blue. Each of the flat screens carried a live digital satellite feed from the cameras of Muhammad Top’s fleet of tiny UAVs now circling above Manhattan and Washington, DC.

On site pilots flew the two-foot-long birds, using joysticks and input from sensor operators seated next to them. Each ground control workstation received feeds via a Ku-Band satellite data link for beyond line-of-sight flight.

Khan smiled his approval. He had designed these UAV systems and it was the first time he’d seen them in a war-footing operation.

The large central monitor was currently dedicated to lower Manhattan. The Staten Island Ferry was just nearing the wharf and lights were coming on in the office towers near the Battery. A row of smaller monitors to either side showed aerial views of Washington, the Chicago lake-front, the port of Miami, and central Los Angeles. Beneath these screens, a secondary grouping of monitors showed views of various border towns along the Texas-Mexico borderline.

“And how go the preparations for the Lone Star State?” Khan asked Top, his eyes fixed on a view of the International Bridge connecting Laredo with its sister city across the border.

“The convoy is assembled, Doctor. It has moved north of the border.”

The two men were certainly a study in contrasts. Khan was a small, modest-looking intellectual. Save the keen intensity of the black eyes, the Iranian would be indistinguishable at any gathering of Muslim elders in Tehran. Of less than medium height, he had a great beak of a nose, with tiny eyeglasses perched on the end of it. He had very small hands and feet that always seemed to be still. He was surprising only in that he had changed into jungle fatigues for the tour.

“Listen carefully,” Khan said, taking a step backward and looking up at his giant host. His black eyes flashing with the reflections of America on the screens above, he said, “I am bringing you a message from on high. Killing Americans is secondary to our true mission. It is only icing on the pudding. Do you understand that?”

“Doctor, with your kind permission, I must argue—”

“Listen! Don’t speak! I am talking about attacking the foundations of the corrupt state these faithless pawns serve. God willing, I am determined to scrape America’s bucolic soil down to the tainted bedrock it is built upon! If you don’t agree, tell me now.”

Top silently nodded his understanding. Patience was required. Khan was having trouble assembling a “coalition of the willing” in the Latin American capitals. More and more it looked as if Top’s righteous legions might be marching north alone. Top was willing to go it alone. But if Khan’s shaky coalition were convinced to step up, it would seal America’s fate.

Khan, visibly tired by the long journey, removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was secretly fighting a crippling headache. He had been anxious to see his military field commander in the flesh. Everything was riding on this one man. As the final hour approached, Castro was waffling. So was Chávez in Venezuela. Both men needed to see if Muhammad Top’s brazen attack could succeed before joining the fray.

Venezuela, in Khan’s view, could seal the victory over the Americans. Chávez, despite all Khan’s assuarances, was taking a wait-and-see attitude. If Tip and Khan succeeded, and brought down the U.S. command and central, Venezuela might decide to strike in the ensuing chaos. Chávez had been secretly building a powerful air force. He had amassed squadrons of the latest Russian fighter jets, the Sukhoi 27 Flanker. Armed with the unstoppable Yahkont antiship missiles, Venezuelan fighter jets could destroy America’s vital oil shipments in the Gulf of Mexico.

It wouldn’t be the end of America, but it might be the beginning of the end.

Top alone, of all his commanders, had the best chance of finally bringing the Americans to their knees. Reports reaching his own mountain hideout from his emissaries were uniformly positive. They all indicated that Muhammad Top had at last built the jihadist juggernaut that would humble the world.

Maybe.

Khan also received monthly intelligence reports from leaders of his South American cells. They provided a more balanced approach to developments in the southern hemisphere. He had carefully monitored Top’s progress over the last few years from afar. Read reports from their brethren in Havana and Caracas and Lima. Now he was here to see for himself exactly what had been accomplished here at La Selva Negra.

And what kind of man he had created in the person of Top.

Papa Top had risen to power and prominence in the wake of the 1991 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Top and Khan had both had a hand in the planning of this deadly attack. But it was Top’s brilliant execution that brought him to the notice of the early al-Qaeda leadership.

After the early success of that Argentine mission, Muhammad Top and his followers had moved north. There, they melted into the Mata Grosso jungles surrounding the Falls at Madre de Dios. Once he had surveyed the jungle and picked his ideal location, Top, always with Khan’s guiding hand, began the long and exceedingly difficult process of building a great terrorist army. At the same time, work was begun in earnest on Khan’s very advanced robotic warfare technology and surveillance drones in complete secrecy.

Khan was the wise and patient mentor, the man who had stolen Western technology and put it into the hands of North Korea, Pakistan, and his secret terrorist operation in the rain forest. Top was the able and willing protégé who worked tirelessly to build a massive fighting force of Holy Warriors. Khan only stole from the best. He studied Japanese work in robotics and applied their learning to military applications. His endless hard cash ensured a flow of information out of top secret U.S. Defense related firms as well.

Early on, the doctor had urged Top, when his army was at strength, to take the war out of the jungles and mountains and bring it directly to the urban population centers of Latin America. Khan had sent this message to his young lieutenant via a courier in 1995. Along with orders from Khan’s mountain headquarters, the messenger had hand-delivered a small gift to Muhammad’s jungle headquarters, then in Venezuela. It was a very special book by Carlos Marighella.

Until he was ambushed and killed by Brazilian police, Marighella was one of South America’s greatest revolutionary heroes. Just before he died, he had written a handbook offering very practical advice for creating a modern guerilla unit. His slim volume, far ahead of its time, had been written at the dawn of terror. The well-thumbed volume soon became Top’s personal bible. He studied it to the point of memorization and often quoted from it to his staff and field commanders. Marighella’s book,
Manual for the Modern Guerilla,
had been Top’s Koran.

Papa Top’s sphere of influence now included terrorist cells and guerilla units across the length and breadth of South America. Each of these was a curious amalgam of drug dealers, arms dealers, and common street criminals. Each one had undergone rigorous paramilitary training under Top’s commanders. His melting-pot army consisted of a seething blend of radical leftists, radical Muslims, and common street criminals whose loyalty was vouchsafed only to him.

“Our next stop is across the river,” Top said. “The Robotic Weapons Research Center. Is everyone ready to move on?”

“Yes,” Abu Khan said, eyes glittering in the electric blue light. “Weapons. Let us go and see our glorious Robot Warriors.”

G
in!” exclaimed Ambrose Congreve, splaying the winning hand upon the patch of green baize in a perfect fan: three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight. Ambrose, already looking tropical in a three-piece suit of rumpled seersucker, sat back in his seat, took a small sip of his spicy Bloody Bull, and relished the expression on his vanquished opponent’s face.

“Gin?” Hawke said, startled out of his reverie by his opponent’s sudden declaration of victory. He stared at the winning cards magically appearing on the table for a moment and then said, “Impossible.”

“Improbably swift, perhaps, but hardly impossible. Read them and weep, dear boy, for n’ere shall you see their like again.”

“How can you gin? We’ve hardly begun this bloody hand. You only drew three cards.”

“Indeed, I drew three cards. To wit, the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight. Gin is the name of the game, my good fellow, now tote me up. Let’s see what you’re hiding. Unless I’m very much mistaken, I believe I’ve caught you with a gross surplus of costly royalty in your hand. Am I correct?”

Hawke sighed in frustration, and reluctantly began showing his cards. Congreve bent forward, smiling eagerly as out they came. He was not disappointed. Two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens, and some other cats and mice. The hand was worth eighty and change. Not bad, Congreve thought.

“Well, well, well,” Congreve said, picking up the score pad and gleefully adding up the totals. “That puts me ahead by a comfortable margin. Just time for one more hand. I spy something that looks suspiciously like Florida down there.”

Hawke glanced out of his window and experienced a pleasurable shudder of anticipation. The Atlantic far below was shading from a deep blue to a lovely aquamarine near the shoreline as the small jet began its gradual descent toward the eastern coastline of the sprawling peninsula. For the first time since waking, he smiled.

After the recent weeks of damp cold, Alex had been keenly looking forward to leaving gloomy England astern and spending some time in the warm tropical sunshine. According to his crew in the cockpit, they would be landing in time for breakfast on board
Blackhawke.
It had been over a year since he’d set foot on his beloved vessel.

“I suppose one of us should wake Miss Guinness,” he said.

“Yes. I have to say C has chosen a most decorous aide-de-camp for this adventure. Don’t you agree?”

“She’s not an ADC, that I promise you.”

“What is she, then?”

“A spy.”

Hawke was only half kidding. British SIS had long used female operators. It was not well known, but, during the Second World War, women had been involved in not a few nasty, physical operations. And, since they had always acquitted themselves quite well, there had been little resistance to getting them involved in elite commando or espionage operations ever since. There were several generations of lady operators out there now. Somewhere in the world, Hawke knew, was a cherubic grandmother with a license to kill.

Congreve was trying to get his pipe lit. “A spy? You mean for C? Yes, that would make perfect sense. Sent to keep an eye on you.”

“What else could she be doing?”

“She’s quite brainy, I believe.”

“I don’t need another brain. I’ve got you.”

“Well, I daresay she’s lovely to look at. Remarkable protuberances.”

“Dishy. As long as she keeps her protuberances out of my way. I intend to admire her from afar.”

“She certainly doesn’t have to stay out of mine. I’m quite looking forward to this tropical holiday you know. There’s something bracing about near-naked females splashing in the surf, don’t you agree? Stiffens one up before the fray, I daresay.”

Near naked? Stiffens one up? Hawke looked for a trace of irony in Congreve’s dancing blue eyes, but could find none.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Constable. You’re practically a married man. I promised Diana I’d keep an eye on you and I intend to do so.”

“You remember what Sherlock Holmes had to say on the subject of marriage, my dear fellow? In the
Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
?”

“No, I do not. And, frankly, I—”

“Gin,” Ambrose said, a small smile of satisfaction playing about his crinkly eyes.

“Again?” Hawke said, throwing his cards down in disgust.

Hawke sensed someone stirring behind him and collapsed back into his seat.

“Oh! Good morning, Mr. Congreve,” Pippa Guinness said, peeking at Ambrose over the back of her reclined seat. She yawned and wiped the sleep from her eyes with the back of her right hand. Hawke, who was facing aft, had his back to her and chose not to acknowledge this greeting by feigning sleep.

He’d made a troublesome discovery the evening prior at the Con-naught Bar. Over drinks with an old colleague who was recently employed at Legoland, he had learned that the lovely Miss Guinness was the source of many of C’s misgivings regarding his Amazon reports. According to his chum, Barry Donohue, Pippa had provided C with her own assessment of the current threat level in the Amazon Triangle. Apparently, she found it significantly lower than Hawke’s own estimates. Told C Hawke was overstating his case.

Hawke wouldn’t have minded that necessarily, but then he’d learned that the young woman had never set foot in the Amazon Basin. Her summary conclusions, passed along to C, were handwritten in the annotated margins of Hawke’s own carefully prepared reports. According to Donohue, all of her conclusions were all based on the accounts of various low-ranking embassy staffers notorious for collecting dated and even erroneous intel in the comfort of their plush offices in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Santiago, and Montevideo. Going out into the field would rarely even occur to them.

It was precisely the reason C had sent Hawke up the river on his “expedition.”

None of this, however, seemed to have occurred to the lovely Miss G. Or, to be honest, C himself.

Hawke suffered no delusions about C’s assigning Pippa Guinness as his “aide” on this trip. The possibility that she was a bona fide field agent was remote. She was tagging along to keep an eye on him and report back to C on all and sundry that she saw and heard in Key West. HM Government had a big stake in Brazil. He was sure the Foreign Secretary had urged C to keep tabs on its erstwhile field agent whilst he was deep inside the American camp.

Miss Guinness was seated just aft of the forward bulkhead on the left. A flat-screen monitor mounted there showed a GPS map of the lower southeastern United States and displayed their current airspeed, estimated time of arrival, and the time and temperature at their destination. The temperature in Miami, Hawke had noted with satisfaction just before they took off from RAF Sedgwick, was a balmy seventy degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature in London had plummeted into the thirties.

After supper aboard, Hawke’s steward had offered to run a film, presenting Pippa Guinness a choice from the onboard DVD library. She’d chosen
Bad Boys,
a fairly recent Will Smith comedy shot in Miami. As it happened, the action comedy was one of Hawke’s favorites and he’d watched some of it himself before becoming embroiled in a two-inch thick LATAM file marked MOST SECRET. This he’d been given by C for his in-flight entertainment.

He plowed through his files, studying the charts and tables, mentally rehearsing his upcoming remarks at the Key West conference. It was not as dry as he’d feared. Whoever had prepared it knew their stuff. Having digested three-quarters of the file, he’d nevertheless fallen asleep. Having slept for a few hours, he then resumed studying the thing at first light before falling into Congreve’s sticky web of aces and deuces, kings and queens.

“Good morning, Miss Guinness,” Ambrose said heartily. “How did you sleep?”

“Most comfortably, thank you,” she said. “This certainly beats economy on Virgin Atlantic.”

“Indeed it does,” Ambrose said. “Hawke Air abounds in creature comforts. Would you like some tea, my dear? Coffee? We’re having breakfast on the ground, but I’m sure the galley could scrounge up a scone or two if you’re so inclined. Eggs and toast?”

“Tea would be lovely, thank you. I’ll just pop into the loo and freshen up if I have time.”

“You do. We’re landing in about half an hour.”

“Brilliant,” she said, climbing deftly out of her seat considering the length of her skirt. “How was your gin rummy game? Did you win, Chief Inspector?”

“Handily, my dear, thanks very much.”

After she’d disappeared from the cabin and closed the door to the head, Hawke, who’d been feigning sleep throughout this conversation, brought his seat upright and looked at Congreve.

“Handily?” Hawke asked. “Is that what you said to her, Constable?”

“Mmm.”

“Handily, my arse. Deal the bloody cards.”