Acts of War oc-4 Page 25

  Watching her father at night, the ten-year-old girl learned patience. She also learned dedication and silence. He worked like an artist, intense and unhappy with distractions. Sondra always remembered the time he'd gotten so much powdered sugar on his face that he looked like a mime. She'd sat on the small, butcher-block kitchen table for nearly sixty full minutes, turning the crank of the ice cream maker and swallowing back a laugh. Had she succumbed, her father would have been deeply offended. For that long, long hour she kept her eyes shut and sang silently to herself — any top-forty tune that would keep her mind off her dad.

  This wasn't her small kitchen in South Norwalk. The man in front of her wasn't her father. But Sondra had flashes of being small and helpless again as her hands were pulled behind her and cuffed to a waist-high iron ring. In front of her, on the other side of the cavern, Mike Rodgers's shirt was cut off with a hunting knife. His arms were pulled up and handcuffed to a ring which hung from the stone ceiling of the cavern. His toes barely touched the floor. As an afterthought, the man with the knife cut a bloody pencil-mustache over Rodgers's upper lip.

  In the glow of the single overhead bulb, Sondra could see Rodgers's face. He was looking in her direction though not at her. As the blood ran in streams into his mouth and down his chin he was focusing on something — a memory? A poem? A dream? At the same time he was obviously marshaling his energy for whatever lay ahead.

  After a few minutes, two men arrived. The first one held a small butane blowtorch. The blue-white flame was already lit and hissing. The other man walked with an imperious strut. His hands were clasped behind him and his pale eyes shifted from Rodgers to Sondra and back again. There was no remorse in those eyes, nor lust. There was just a sense of cold purpose.

  The man stopped with his back to Sondra. "I am the commander," he said in a rich, thinly accented voice. "Your name does not matter to me. If you die, it does not matter to me. All that matters is that you tell us everything you know about the operation of your vehicle. If you do not do so quickly, you will die where you are and we will move on to the young lady. She will suffer a different punishment" — he looked at her again—"a far more humiliating one." He looked back at Rodgers. "When we are finished with her we will move to another member of your group. If you elect to cooperate, you will be returned to your cell. Though you murdered one of our people, you did what any good soldier would have done. I have no interest in punishing you and you will be released as soon at it can be arranged. Do you wish to tell us what you know?"

  Rodgers said nothing. The man waited only a few seconds.

  "I understand you withstood a cigarette lighter in the desert," the man said. "Very good. So that you will know what to expect this time, we will burn the flesh from your arms and chest. Then we will remove your trousers and continue down to the bottom of your legs. You will scream until your throat bleeds. Are you sure you don't wish to speak?"

  Rodgers said nothing. The commander sighed, then nodded to the man with the blowtorch. He stepped forward, turned it toward Rodgers's left armpit, and brought it forward slowly.

  The general's jaw went rigid, his eyes widened, and his feet jumped from the floor. Within seconds, the smell of burned hair and flesh made the thick air fouler. Sondra had to breathe through her mouth to keep from retching.

  The commander turned toward Sondra. He covered her mouth to force her to breathe through her pose. He was simultaneously pushing up on her jaw so that she couldn't bite him.

  "It has been my experience," said the man, "that one member of a party always tells us what we wish to know. If you talk now you can save them all. Including this man.Your people were oppressed. They are oppressed still." He removed his hand. "Can you not sympathize with our plight?"

  Sondra knew she wasn't supposed to speak to her captors. But he'd given her an opening and she had to try reason with him. "Your plight, yes. Not this."

  "Then put a stop to it," the commander said. "You're not an archaeologist. You're a soldier." He nodded toward Rodgers. "This man has been trained. I can see that. I feel it." He stepped closer to Sondra. "I don't enjoy doing this. Talk to me. Help me and you help him. You help my people. You will save lives."

  Sondra said nothing.

  "I understand," the commander said. "But I won't let dozens of women and children die every day because others do not approve of our culture, our language, our form of Islam. Hundreds of my people are in Syrian prisons where they're tortured by the Mukhabarat, the secret police. Surely you can understand my desire to help them."

  "I understand," she replied, "and I sympathize. But the cruelty of others doesn't justify your own."

  "This is not cruelty," he said. "I would like to stop. I have been tortured. I have suffered for hours with electric wires threaded inside my body so there would be no bruises. A dead animal hung around your neck in a steaming-hot cell leaves no marks. Nor do the flies it attracts or the vomiting it induces. My wife was raped to death by an entire Turkish unit. I found her body in the hills. She was violated in ways which I hope are worse than you can imagine." He looked back at Rodgers. "Other nations have made halfhearted efforts to help us. The United States special envoy tried to bring together the feuding Talabani and Barzani factions in Iraq. He had no budget, no arms for them. He failed. The United States Air Force tried to prevent the Iraqis from bombing Kurds in the north. They succeeded, so the Iraqis simply poisoned their water supply. The Air Force could not prevent that. It is time for us to help ourselves. For one of us to lead all of us."

  This is why we aren't supposed to talk to them, Sondra thought. The man was making perfect sense. And the Kurd was right about one thing. Someone would probably talk. But it couldn't be her. She had taken an oath of allegiance, and part of that oath was to obey orders. Rodgers did not want her to speak. She couldn't. She wouldn't. Living with that shame would be worse than dying.

  She continued to look at the commander as Rodgers's handcuffs rattled against the iron ring. After a minute, the torch was moved to Rodgers other side. He jumped this time, and so did she, as the flame was applied. The jaw was no longer so strong. His mouth fell open, his eyes rolled, and his entire body trembled. The tips of his feet kicked up and down vigorously. But he didn't scream.

  The commander watched with a relaxed, confident expression as the flame was moved to Rodgers's back. Rodgers arched and shook and shut his eyes. His mouth went wide and there was a gurgling deep in his throat. As soon as Rodgers became aware of the sound he forced his mouth shut.

  Though tears formed in her eyes and fear dried her mouth, Sondra refused to say a word.

  Suddenly, the commander said something in Arabic. The torturer stepped away from Rodgers and shut off the burner. The commander turned to Sondra.

  I will give you a few minutes to think without having to see your friend suffer." He smiled at her. "Your friend or your superior officer? No matter. Think about the people you can help. Yours as well as mine. I ask you to think about the German people during the Second World War. Were the patriots those who did the bidding of Hitler, or those who did what was right?"

  The commander waited a moment. When Sondra said nothing, he walked away. The torturer left with him.

  As their footsteps died, Sondra looked at Rodgers. He raised his head slowly.

  "Say nothing," he ordered.

  "I know," she said.

  "We are not Nazi Germany," Rodgers gasped. "These people are terrorists. They'll use the ROC to kill. Do you understand?"

  "I do," she said.

  Rodgers's head dropped again. Through tears, Sondra looked at the dark, raw burns under his upraised arms. Rodgers was right. These men had killed thousands of people by blowing up the dam. They'd kill even more if they were able to use the ROC to watch troop movements or listen to communications. The Kurds were oppressed, but would they be any better under a warlord like this? He was a man who had suffered, yet he was willing to burn hostages alive and keep them in pits to get his way. If he were Syrian, would
he tolerate the Turkish Kurds? If he were Turkish, would he tolerate the Iraqi Kurds?

  She didn't know. But if Mike Rodgers was prepared to die to say no to him, she was too.

  And then she heard the footsteps returning. Sondra saw Mike Rodgers breathe deeply to bring up his courage and resolve and felt her own legs weaken. She pulled on the handcuffs and wished she could at least die fighting their captors.

  The torturer reappeared without the commander. After lighting the burner, he moved toward Mike Rodgers again. And impassively, as though he were igniting a barbecue pit, he turned the flame on Rodgers's breastbone.

  And after his head rolled back and he fought for a long moment to keep his teeth clenched, the general finally screamed.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Tuesday, 3:55 a.m.,

  Washington, D. C.

  Bob Herbert started working on his fourth pot of coffee while Matt Stoll finished off his seventh can of Tab. Except for bathroom breaks, neither man had left Stoll's office, even when the night shift came on duty.

  The two were examining photographs of the Bekaa Valley which had been taken from 1975 through the present by satellites, infiltrators, and Israeli Sayeret Tzanhanim paratroopers. They knew the ROC was somewhere in the valley, but they didn't know where. An F-16 flyover from Incirlik hadn't provided any clues. The thick tree cover and camouflage undermined visual reconnaissance. And except for the low-watt satellite-killer program, the ROC had apparently been shut down or else hidden in a cave or beneath a ledge. Otherwise, an infrared search might have turned up something. The Air Force plane had also been sending out millimeter-wave microwave signals in an effort to raise the ROC's active-passive radar reflector. Had Rodgers been able to get to the dashboard and switch the ROC transponder on, it would have replied with a coded message. So far, there had been only silence.

  With nothing else to go on, the two men looked at photographs. Herbert wasn't certain what he was looking for. But as the pictures filled Stoll's twenty-inch monitor, the intelligence chief tried to think like the enemy.

  According to Turkish intelligence, which was confirmed by Israeli intelligence, there were nearly fifteen thousand PKK soldiers. Some ten thousand of those were living in the hills of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The rest were divided into pockets of ten to twenty fighters. Some of these people were assigned to specific areas of Damascus or Ankara or other major cities. Others were in charge of training, communications, or maintaining supply lines through the Bekaa Valley. Now, the Bekaa was also apparently the home of a new, aggressive Syrian Kurdish unit. One which was working closely with, or perhaps even joined with, Kurds from Turkey and Iraq.

  "So the terrorists capture the ROC," Herbert said.

  Stoll let his forehead plunk down on his arms, which were crossed on his desk. "Not again, Bob."

  "Yes, again," Herbert said.

  "There's got to be something else we can try," Stoll moaned. "The farmers out in the fields contact their hands using cellular phones. Let's listen to them. Maybe they saw something."

  "My team is doing that. They've picked up zip." Herbert took a mouthful of warm coffee from a chipped, stained mug which had once sat on the desk of OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan. "So the terrorists capture the ROC. They report back to their headquarters. Since we can't find the terrorists, we have to find the command base. The question is, what do we look for?"

  "A command center has to have access to water, and it'll have generators for electricity and a radar dish for communications and probably heavy tree cover for security," Stoll droned. "We've been through this a zillion times. Water can be trucked in or flown in, generator exhaust can be vented by hose to someplace and dispersed so an airplane heat-sensor won't see it, and a radar dish is easy to hide."

  "If you decide to chopper in drinking water, you'd have to make a hellava lot of flights," Herbert said. "Enough so that you stand a good chance of being spotted."

  "Even at night?"

  "No," Herbert said. "At night you stand a good chance of crashing into some of those peaks, especially if you're using a twenty- or thirty-year-old bird. As for trucks, water can only be trucked in if there's a road nearby. So if the base isn't near a stream — and there aren't very many in this region — it has to be near the highway or at least a dirt road."

  "Granted," Stoll said. "But that still leaves us about thirty or forty possible locations for a terrorist base. We keep examining these same pictures and magnifying different sections of them and computer-analyzing the geology of the region, and we still come up with squat."

  "That's because we're obviously not looking for the right thing," Herbert said. "Every human activity leaves traces." He was annoyed with himself. Even without some of the high-tech satellite and surveillance tools he'd normally have at his disposal, he should be able to find those traces. Wild Bill Donovan did. Lives and national security depended upon it. "Okay," he said. "We know the command center is somewhere in there. What other trappings would it have?"

  Stoll raised his head. "Barbed wire hidden in vines, which we haven't seen. Mines, which we can't see anyway. Cigarette butts, which we could see if we had a satellite that we could turn on the area. We've been through all that."

  "Then let's look at it a different way," Herbert said.

  "Fine. I'm game. Fire away."

  "You're a terrorist leader," Herbert said. "What's the most important asset you need in a base?"

  "Air. Food. Sanitation. Those are the biggies, I'd guess."

  "There's one more," Herbert said. "A bigger one. The top quality you'd look for is safety. A combination of defensibility and impregnability."

  "From what?" Stoll asked. "From spies or attack? From the ground or the air? For assault or retreat?"

  "Safety from aerial bombardment," Herbert said. "Flyovers and artillery fire are the easiest, safest ways to take an enemy base out."

  "Okay," said Stoll. "So where does that lead us?"

  "We know that most of these caves are made of — what did Phil call them in his analysis?"

  "I don't remember," Stoll said. "Porous rock, sponge rock, something that sounded like you could quarry it with a good karate chop."

  "Right," said Herbert. "The thing is, that kind of rock only protects the terrorists from surveillance by air, not from attack. What does?"

  "Protect from attack? You said that terrorists in the Bekaa move around a lot," Stoll said, "like mobile Scuds. Their best defense is keeping anyone from knowing where they are."

  "True," Herbert said. "But this situation may be different."

  "Why?"

  "Logistics," Herbert replied. "If these terrorists are coordinating movements in at least two nations, they haves to remain centralized to distribute arms, bomb parts, maps, information."

  "With computers and cellular phones, most of those capacities are pretty transportable," Stoll pointed out.

  "Maybe you can move the trappings around," Herbert agreed. "But these guys would also have been training for a series of very specific missions." He took another swallow of coffee. Grounds washed along his gums as he reached the bottom of the cup. He absently spat them back in. "Let's think this through. When any strike force trains for a specific mission, they build replicas of the sites."

  "These guys wouldn't have built a mockup of the Ataturk Dam, Bob."

  "No," Herbert agreed. "They wouldn't have had to, though."

  "Why not?"

  "That part was pure muscle. The terrorists didn't have to work out technique and finesse because they just flew in, dropped their bombs, and got out. But if that was simply a precipitating incident, which it almost certainly was, they'll probably have follow-up assaults planned. Assaults which will have to be rehearsed."

  "Why?" Stoll asked. "What makes you think those assaults won't be pure muscle as well?"

  Herbert drained his mug. There were more grounds in his mouth. He spat them back into the cup before pushing it to the side of the desk. "Because historically, Matt, the first strik
e in a war or war-phase is big, surprising, and strategic — like Pearl Harbor or the Normandy invasion. It destabilizes and shocks. After that, the enemy is ready, so you have to shift into a more methodical mode. Careful, surgical assaults."

  "Like capturing important towns or killing opposition leaders."

  "Exactly," Herbert said. "That requires site-specific training. When combined with the other factors about communications, supplies, and commands, that means a more or less permanent base."

  "Maybe," Stoll said. He pointed at the monitor. "But not in caves like the soft-rock jobbers we have here. You can't reinforce those. Lookit. They're not very big to begin with, only about seven feet tall and five wide. If you throw in a lot of iron and wood supports, you'd barely have room to move around."

  Herbert chewed on a lingering coffee ground for a moment, then absently pulled it out. He looked at it. "Wait a minute," he said. "Dirt."

  "What?" Stoll asked.

  Herbert held out the dark ground and then flicked it away. "Dirt. You can't build much inside one of those caves but you can excavate. The North Vietnamese did it all the time."

  "You mean an underground bunker," Stoll said.

  Herbert nodded. "It's the perfect solution. It also narrows down our search. You can't blast a tunnel in caves like these or the roof'll come down on you—"