Dead or Alive Read online

  “Am I late?” Mary Pat asked, and took a seat. Beyond the glass wall, the staff of the operations center silently went about its business. Like virtually every conference room at Liberty Crossing, the Counterterrorism Center was an EM tank—isolated from virtually all electromagnetic emissions, both inbound and outbound, save encrypted data streams.

  “No, we’re early,” Margolin said. “The package is on its way down.”

  “And?”

  “We missed him,” Turnbull grumbled.

  “Was he ever there?”

  “Hard to say.” This from Operations Chief Janet Cummings. “We’ve got product from the raid, but how good we don’t know. Somebody was there—probably a higher-up—but beyond that ...”

  “Nine dead,” Turnbull said.

  “Prisoners?”

  “Started with two, but during the exfil the team was am-bushed and they lost one; lost the second when their LZ took an RPG. Lost some Rangers, too.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  Ah shit, indeed, Mary Pat thought. The Rangers would, of course, be mourning the loss of one of their own, but these guys were the best of the best; consequently, they took the hazards simply as part of the job. They were consummate professionals, but whereas their civilian counterparts might know how to unclog a drain or rewire a house or build a skyscraper, Rangers specialized in something completely different: killing bad guys.

  “The team leader”—Cummings paused to check her file—“Sergeant Driscoll, was wounded, but he made it. According to Driscoll’s after-action report, the prisoner stood up during the firefight. On purpose.”

  “Christ,” Mary Pat muttered. They’d seen that before with URC soldiers, preferring death over capture. Whether that was born of pride or an unwillingness to risk talking during interrogation was a point of heated debate in the intelligence and military communities.

  “The second one tried to make a break for it when the helo went down. They dropped him.”

  “Well, not exactly a dry hole,” Turnbull said, “but not the result we wanted.”

  The problem hadn’t been the radio transmission, of that Mary Pat was certain. She’d read both the raw data and the analysis. Somebody had been transmitting from that cave using recognized URC plain-speak code packets. One of the words—Lotus—is something they’d seen before, both in asset debriefs from case officers and in NSA Driftnet intercepts, but what it meant no one had been able to determine.

  They’d long suspected the URC had gone old school for its encrypted communications, employing onetime pads, essentially a point-to-point protocol where only the sender and receiver had the pad required to decrypt the message. The system was ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, but reliable and, provided the pads were in fact fully randomized, nearly impossible to break unless you got your hands on a pad. On a Tuesday, say, Bad Guy A would send a series of key words—dog, cabbage, chair—to Bad Guy B, who, using his own pad, would convert the words to their alphanumeric value, so dog would translate into 4, 15, and 7, which in turn would translate into a different word altogether. Special Forces teams in Afghanistan had in raids captured a number of onetime pads, but none were current, and so far neither the CIA nor the NSA had been able to glean a pattern from which they might extrapolate a key.

  There were downsides to the system, however. First, it was cumbersome. For it to work properly, senders and receivers had to be working on the same physical pads, switching to a new one at the same intervals, the more often the better, which in turn required couriers to move between Bad Guy A and Bad Guy B. Whereas the CIA had Acre Station dedicated to hunting down the Emir, the FBI had a working group called Clownfish, dedicated to intercepting a URC courier.

  The big question, Mary Pat knew, was: What had prompted whoever had been living in the cave to bug out shortly before the team hit the ground? Dumb coincidence or something more? She doubted it was human error; Rangers were too good for that. She had, in fact, read the after-action report earlier that day, and in addition to a broken wheel suffered by the team’s CO and Driscoll’s own injury, the op had been costly: two dead and two wounded. All that for a dry hole.

  Barring coincidence, the most likely culprit was word of mouth. Rare was the day a helo could lift off from bases in either Pakistan or Afghanistan without a URC soldier or sympathizer taking note and making a call, a problem that had partially been solved by Special Forces teams making short, random hops around the countryside in the hours and days leading up to an op as well as using offset waypoints en route to the target, both of which helped keep prying eyes guessing. The rugged and unforgiving terrain made this problematic, though, as did the weather, which often made certain routes impassable. Just as Alexander the Great’s Army and the Soviets after them had learned, the geography of Central Asia was a foe unto itself. And an unconquerable one at that, Mary Pat thought. You either learned to live with it or work around it, or you failed. Hell, both Napoléon and Hitler had learned that lesson—albeit belatedly—each during a bold, if ill-advised, wintertime invasion of Russia. Of course, each of them had been certain of a quick victory, long before the snow started flying. And, hell, in Russia the land was nice and flat. Add mountains to the mix . . . Well, you’ve got Central Asia.

  A courier appeared at the glass door, punched in the cipher code, and entered. Without a word he laid a stack of four brown, red-striped folders and an accordion folder before Margolin and then departed. Margolin passed out the folders, and for the next fifteen minutes the group read in silence.

  Finally Mary Pat said, “A sand table? I’ll be damned.”

  “Woulda been nice if they’d brought it back whole,” Turnbull said.

  “Look at the dimensions,” Cummings said. “No way to get it outta there on foot. Not without compromising the team. Right call, I think.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” the Acre Station chief mumbled, unconvinced. Turnbull was under incredible pressure. While the official line was that the Emir wasn’t at the top of the United States’ Most Wanted List, he indeed was. However unlikely his capture was to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, having him on the loose out there was at best embarrassing. At worst, dangerous. John Turnbull had been hunting the Emir since 2003, first as Acre Station’s deputy, then as its head.

  As good as Turnbull was at his job, like many current career CIA officers, he suffered from what Mary Pat and Ed called “operational disconnect.” He simply had no idea what an op looked like or felt like, in person, on the ground, and that disconnect led to a plethora of problems, which generally fell into one category: unrealistic expectations. In planning an op, you expect too much, either from the people working it or from the scope of the mission. Most ops aren’t home runs; they are base hits that slowly and steadily put points on the board that eventually add up to a big win. As Ed’s literary agent once told him, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” The same was generally true with covert ops. Sometimes intelligence, preparation, and good luck come together in the right way at the right time, but most times they’re out of sync just enough to keep that long ball from sailing over the left-field fence. And sometimes, she reminded herself as she continued scanning the report, you don’t know you’ve got a home run until well after the fact.

  “You see this business about the Koran they found?” Cummings asked the group. “No way that belonged to anybody in that cave.”

  No one responded; there was no need. She was right, of course, but barring an inscription and a “return to” address on the front cover, an antique Koran wasn’t going to do them much good.

  “They got plenty of pictures, I see,” Mary Pat said. The Rangers had meticulously photographed all the URC faces in the cave. If any of them had been nabbed or tagged in the past, the computer would spit out the details. “And samples of the table. Smart guy, this Driscoll. Where are the samples, Ben?”

  “Somehow they missed the helo out of Centcom Kabul. They’ll be here in the morning.”

  Mary Pat wonde
red what, if anything, the samples would tell them. Langley’s Science and Tech wizards were miracle workers, as were the FBI labs at Quantico, but there was no telling how long that thing had been in the cave, nor was there any guarantee the mock-up would hold any peculiar traits. Crapshoot.

  “Pictures we got now,” Margolin said.

  He picked up a remote control from the table and pointed it at the forty-two-inch flat screen on the wall. A moment later an 8×10 grid of thumbnail images appeared on the monitor. Each was annotated by a date and a time stamp. Margolin clicked the remote and enlarged the first photo, which showed the sand table in situ from a distance of about four feet.

  Whoever had actually taken the shots had done a thorough job, Mary Pat saw, photographing the sand table from the macro to the micro, using a miniature measuring tape for scale in each shot. Despite it being a cave, they’d taken care with the lighting, too, which made a big difference. Of the 215 shots Driscoll and his team had taken, 190 were variations on a theme—same view but close up or at a different angle—and Mary Pat wondered if there was enough for Langley to create a 3-D rendering of the thing. Something to pursue. Whether animating the damn thing would make any difference she had no idea, but better to try it and fail than later regret not trying. Somebody in the URC had gone to a lot of trouble to make this thing, and it’d be nice to know why. You don’t make a goddamned sand table on a whim.

  According to the report, the remaining twenty-five pictures were repeats of three separate spots on the sand table, two on the front and one on the back, all displaying some kind of marking. Mary Pat asked Margolin to call these up on the monitor, which he did, setting it for slideshow. When it was done, Mary Pat said, “The two on the front look like manufacturer’s marks. Driscoll said the base was heavy-duty plywood. Might be able to use the marks to track something down. The other mark, on the back . . . Tell me if I’m wrong, but that looks handwritten.”

  “Agreed,” Margolin said. “We’ll turn the translators loose.”

  “And what about the million-dollar question?” Cummings said. “Why make the sand table, and where’s it supposed to represent?”

  “The Emir’s vacation spot, I hope,” Turnbull said.

  They all laughed.

  “If wishes were horses ...” Margolin mused. “Mary Pat, I can see the gears cranking in your head. Got an idea?”

  “Maybe; lemme get back to you.”

  “How about the documents in the ammo box?” Turnbull asked.

  “Translators estimate tomorrow afternoon,” Margolin said. He opened the accordion file, withdrew the map from the cave, and unfolded it on the table. Everyone stood up and leaned over it.

  Cummings read the legend: “Defense Mapping Agency . . . 1982?”

  “Left behind by the CIA advisers,” Mary Pat said. “They wanted the mujahideen to have maps, just not the best maps.”

  Margolin turned the map over, displaying the Baedeker’s Peshawar side.

  “Got some markings here,” Mary Pat said, tapping the paper and leaning closer. “Dots. Ballpoint pen.” They scoured the map and in short order found nine marks, each a cluster of either three or four dots.

  “Who’s got a knife?” Mary Pat asked. Turnbull handed her a pocketknife, and she slit the masking tape along all four edges, then turned the Baedeker’s over. “There you are. ...” she murmured.

  Inscribed in the upper-right-hand corner, no larger than a quarter-inch, was an upward-pointing arrow followed by three dots, and a downward-pointing arrow followed by four dots.

  “Legend,” Margolin whispered.

  23

  IT STARTED in the Department of Justice. Forwarded by the Pentagon, it was First Sergeant Driscoll’s written report of his takedown in the Hindu Kush cave. The report—only three pages long, and simply written—detailed what Driscoll and his men had done. What flagged it for the attorney who reviewed the report was the body count. Driscoll reported having killed nine or so Afghan fighters, four of them with a silenced pistol at zero range. Direct shots to the head, the attorney saw, which made his blood run a little cold. It was the nearest thing he’d ever read to a confession of cold-blooded murder. He’d read his share of such confessions but never written so directly. This Driscoll fellow had violated some rules or laws or something, the attorney thought. It wasn’t a battlefield action, not even a sniper’s account of killing people at a hundred yards or so as they stuck their heads up like ducks at a shooting gallery. He’d taken care of the “bad guys” (so he called them) while they slept. Slept. Totally harmless, the lawyer thought, and he’d killed them without as much as a thought and reported it straightforwardly, like an account of cutting the grass in his front yard.

  This was outrageous. He’d had “the drop” on them, as they said in Western movies. They’d been unable to resist. Hadn’t even known their lives were in danger, but this Driscoll guy had taken out his pistol and dispatched them like a kid stomping on insects. But they hadn’t been insects. They’d been human beings, and under international law, they’d been entitled to capture and to be transformed into prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Protocols. But Driscoll had killed them, totally without mercy. Worse still, the knuckle-dragger seemed to have given little thought to whether the men he’d killed could have been milked for information. He’d decided, quite arbitrarily, it seemed, that the nine men were worthless, both as human beings and as sources.

  The lawyer was young, not yet thirty years of age. He’d graduated Yale at the top of his class before taking an offer to work in Washington. He’d almost clerked for a Supreme Court justice, but had been knocked out of that slot by a hick from the University of Michigan. He wouldn’t have liked it anyway, he was sure. The new Supreme Court, in place for five or so years now, was full of conservative “strict constructionists” who worshipped the letter of the law as if it were Zeus of ancient times. Like Southern Baptists in their country pulpits or on TV on Sunday mornings, which he saw only in glimpses while surfing the channels for the morning talk shows.

  Damn.

  He reread the report and was again shocked at the bare facts of the third-grade language. A United States Army soldier had killed without mercy, and without regard to international law. Then he wrote a report on the event, outlining the process in stark terms.

  The report had come to his desk from a friend and classmate working in the office of the Secretary of Defense, with a cover note saying that nobody in the Pentagon had taken much note of it, but that he, the other attorney, had found it outrageous. The new SecDef had been captured by the bloated bureaucracy on the other side of the river. A lawyer himself, he’d spent too much time with those creatures in uniform. He hadn’t been alarmed by this bloody report, and that despite the fact that the sitting President had issued directives on the use of force, even on the battlefield.

  Well, he’d see about this, the attorney thought. He wrote up his own summary of the case, with a blistering cover note that would go to his section chief, a Harvard graduate who had the President’s ear—well, he might; his father was one of the President’s foremost political supporters.

  This First Sergeant Driscoll was a murderer, the attorney thought. Oh, in a court of law the judge might take pity on him, noting that he was a soldier on what was a battlefield, sort of. It wasn’t really a war, the attorney knew, since Congress had not declared war, but it was commonly assumed to be so, and the attorney for Driscoll would point that out, and the Federal District Court judge—who would have been selected by the defense for his equanimity to soldiers—would take pity on the killer for that reason. It was a standard defense tactic, but even so, this killer would be slapped down rather hard. Even if acquitted (which was likely, given the composition of the jury that the attorney for the defense would work hard to select, not a difficult task in North Carolina), he’d learn a lesson, and the lesson would be learned by a lot of other soldiers who’d much rather shoot guns on a hillside than sit in a law court.

  What the h
ell; it would send a message, and it was a message that needed to be sent. Of the many things that distinguished the United States from Banana Republics was the military’s unwavering obedience to its civilian leadership. Without that, America was no better than Cuba or frickin’ Uganda under Idi Amin. The scope of Driscoll’s crime, while admittedly small, was beside the point. These people needed to be reminded who they answered to.

  The attorney drafted his endorsement to the document and e-mailed it to his section chief with a return-receipt feature allowed on the in-house computer network. This Driscoll guy needed to be slapped down, and he was the man to do it. The young attorney was sure of that. Okay, fine, they’d been after the Emir, but they hadn’t got him, and there was a price for failure in the real world.

  After a five-hour journey by car, he boarded a plane in Caracas for the flight to Dallas and points beyond. Shasif Hadi’s carry-on bag held a laptop that had been duly checked at the gate to make sure it was real. Also checked were the nine CD-ROMs in the bag with various games for him to play on the hop across the ocean. Except for one. Even if that one had been examined, it would have been shown to contain gibberish, robustly encrypted data written in C++ computer code that made no sense at all, but unless the TSA had programmers or hackers on staff at the checkpoints, there would be no way of distinguishing it from a regular computer game. He’d been told nothing of the contents and had merely been given a meeting place in Los Angeles to hand it over to someone he would know only by the exchange of carefully scripted recognition phrases.