Locked On jrj-3 Read online

  “I hear you. Let’s grab a table at the café across the way, maybe get some pictures of these jokers. We’ll send them back to Rick and see if his geeks can ID them. The one in back looks like he’s in charge.”

  A minute later, the two Americans sat in the shade under an umbrella in the open-air café that faced the kahwah. A waitress in a chador stepped up to the table. Dom took the lead with the ordering, much to the surprise of Sam Driscoll. “Kahwaziyada,” he said with a polite smile, and then motioned diven motito himself and Sam.

  The woman nodded and stepped away.

  “Do I want to know what you just ordered us?”

  “Two Turkish coffees with extra sugar.”

  Sam shrugged, stretched the tight scar tissue of his shoulder wound with a long, slow neck roll. “Sounds pretty good. I could use the caffeine.”

  The coffee came, and they sipped it. They did not look over at their target. If his security detail was any good, they would be evaluating the Westerners sitting across the alley, but probably only for the first couple of minutes. If Sam and Dom were careful to completely ignore them, then el Daboussi, his men, and the three other new arrivals would satisfy themselves that the Westerners were just a couple of tourists, sitting and waiting while their wives shopped the souk for rugs, and there was nothing to be concerned about.

  Even though Sam and Dom were operational and in no small danger here spying on a terrorist, they enjoyed being outside, sipping coffee in the sunlight. For the past few days they’d gone out only at night, and then only in shifts. The rest of the time they’d operated from a studio apartment across from a posh walled residence rented by el Daboussi in the upscale Zamalek neighborhood. They had spent long days and nights peering through scopes, photographing visitors, and eating rice and lamb in quantities that caused both men to no longer be great fans of either rice or lamb.

  But Sam and Dom, as well as their support team back at The Campus, both knew this work was important.

  While Mustafa el Daboussi was Egyptian by birth, he’d been living in Pakistan and Yemen for the past fifteen years or so, working for the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. Now that the URC was in utter disarray due to the disappearance of their leader and a number of recent intelligence successes attributed to the CIA and other agencies, el Daboussi was back home, ostensibly working for the new government in some paper-pushing job in Alexandria.

  But The Campus had learned there was more to this story. Jack Ryan Jr. had been going down the roster of known URC players, trying to find out where they were and what they were doing now, by using both classified and open-source intelligence. It was difficult work, but it had culminated with the discovery that MED, as Mustafa el Daboussi was known at The Campus, had been given a “no show” job by members of the Muslim Brotherhood who held the reins of power in parts of Egypt. Further investigation had indicated that MED had been placed in charge of setting up a pair of training camps near Egypt’s border with Libya. According to classified CIA documents, ostensibly the plan was to have Egyptian intelligence train Libya’s civilian militia into something of a real national defense force.

  But some in the CIA, and everyone at The Campus, thought that was a lie. MED’s history showed he had interest only in supporting terror against infidels; he didn’t seem like a good fit to train a home guard in North Africa.

  So when a coded e-mail from a MED associate’s account was picked up by The Campus saying el Daboussi would spend a week in Cairo meeting with foreign contacts who would be helping him with his new “enterprise,” Sam Granger, the chief of operations, immediately sent Sam Driscoll and Dominic Caruso over to get pictures of whoever came to see MED at his rented house, in hopes of getting a better idea of the real objective of these new camps.

  While the Americans sat at their table and pretended to be nothing more than bored tourists, they talabots, theked about the Turkish coffee they were drinking. They agreed that it was incredibly good, even though they had identical stories about accidentally sucking down a mouthful of the bitter grounds that collected in the bottom of the cup the first time they tried it.

  After their coffee was more than half put away, they returned to their operation. One at a time, they took turns glancing into the dim room across the alley. Just nonchalant little eye sweeps at first. After a minute of this, they recognized they were in the clear — none of the six men at the table gave them any unwanted attention.

  Dom pulled his sunglasses case from his jeans and placed it on the table. He opened the top and then pinched the padding and fabric away from the inside of the lid. This revealed a tiny LCD screen, and the screen projected the image being captured by the twelve-megapixel camera secreted into the base of the case. Using his mobile phone, he transmitted a Bluetooth signal to the covert camera. With the signal he was able to increase the zoom on the camera until the LCD monitor displayed a perfectly framed image of the six men at the two tables. As el Daboussi and his two henchmen smoked sheesha and talked to the three men at the next table, Caruso took dozens of digital images through the surreptitious camera on the table by using the photo button on his mobile phone.

  While Dom concentrated on his work, careful not to look like he was concentrating, Sam said, “Those new guys are military. The big guy in the middle, the one with his back to the wall, is a senior officer.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because I was military, and I was not a senior officer.”

  “Right.”

  Driscoll continued. “Can’t explain how I know, exactly, but he’s at least a colonel, maybe even a general. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “He’s not Egyptian, that’s for sure,” said Dom, as he slid the camera back into his pocket.

  Driscoll did not move his head. Instead he studied the coarse, wet grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. “He’s Pakistani.”

  “That was my guess.”

  “We’ve got pictures, let’s not push our luck,” said Sam.

  “Agreed,” replied Dom. “I’m tired of watching other people eat lunch. Let’s go find some food.”

  “Rice and lamb?” asked Sam morosely.

  “Better. I saw a McDonald’s by the metro.”

  “McLamb it is.”

  5

  Jack Ryan Jr. pulled his Hummer into his designated parking space in the lot of Hendley Associates at 5:10 a.m. He struggled to climb out of the big vehicle. His muscles ached; cuts and bruises covered his arms and legs.

  He limped through the back door of the building. He did not like coming in so early, especially considering how beat-up he was this morning. But he had important work that could not wait. At this moment there were four operatives in the field, and although he truly wished he were out there with them, Ryan knew it was his responsibility to provide them the best real-time intelligence he could in order to make their tough work, if not easier, at least not any harder than it needed to be.

  He passed a security man at the reception desk in the go lobby. As far as Jack was concerned, the guard was freakishly awake and alert at this rude hour.

  “Morning, Mr. Ryan.”

  “Hey, Bill.” Normally Ryan didn’t come in until eight, and by then Bill, a retired Air Force Security Force master sergeant, had handed off his post to Ernie. Ryan had met Bill only a couple of times, but he seemed like he was born to do his job.

  Jack Junior took the elevator up, shuffled through the dark hallway, dropped his leather messenger bag off in his cubicle, and headed for the kitchen. There he started a pot of coffee and then reached into the freezer and pulled out an ice pack that had been getting a lot of use of late.

  Back at his desk while the coffee brewed, he lit up his computer and flipped on the lamp. Other than Jack, some IT guys who worked twenty-four/seven, a third-shift analytical/ translation unit, and the security men on the first floor, the building would be dead for at least another hour. Jack sat, held the ice to his jaw, and put his head down on his desk.

  “Shit,” he mumbled.<
br />
  Five minutes later, the coffeemaker dripped its last drop into the pot just as Ryan grabbed a mug from the cabinet; he poured steaming black liquid into it and hobbled back to his desk.

  He wanted to go back home and lie down, but that was not an option. The after-hours training Ryan had been going through was kicking his ass, but he knew he wasn’t in any real danger. His colleagues out in the field were the ones in peril, and it was his job to help them out.

  And his tool to help them was his computer. More specifically, it was the data that the parabolic dishes on the roof and the antenna farm of Hendley Associates pulled out of the ether, the data the code breakers and a mainframe supercomputer decoded from the near constant haul of encrypted information. Jack’s daily morning fishing expedition derived its fish from data traffic from CIA in Langley, from the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, from the National Counterterrorism Center at Liberty Crossing in McLean, from the FBI in D.C., and from a host of other agencies. Today he saw he had a particularly large pull to go through even this early in the morning. Much of it was traffic that came to Langley from friendly nations overseas, and this is what he’d arrived early to peruse.

  Jack logged in to the NSA’s Executive Intercept Transcript first. The XITS, or “zits,” would alert him to any big goings-on that he had missed since leaving work at six the previous afternoon. As his screen began filling with data, he took mental stock of what was going on today. The operational tempo, or OPTEMPO, here at The Campus had been going up precipitously in the past few weeks, so Jack found it harder and harder each morning to decide on a starting place for his day’s duties.

  The four Campus operatives out in the field were divided into two teams. Jack Junior’s cousin Dominic Caruso was teamed with ex — Army Ranger Sam Driscoll. They were in Cairo, tailing a Muslim Brotherhood operative who, Jack and his fellow analysts at The Campus had reason to suspect, was doing his best to raise some hell. According to the CIA, the man had been setting up training camps in western Egypt and was purchasing weapons and ammunition from a source in the Egyptian Army. After that… Well, that was the problem. No one had been able to figure out what he was doing with the camps and the guns and the know-how he’d obtained working for the URC and other groups for the past two decades. All they knew was that he and his camps and his guns were in Egypt.

  Jack sighed. Egyes. sighedpt, post-Mubarak. Pre-fucked-up free-fire zone?

  The American media declared as fact that the changes in the Middle East would promote peace and tranquility, but Ryan, The Campus, and a lot of people in the know around the world thought it likely that the changes in the Middle East would usher in not moderation but rather extremism.

  To many in the American media, people who thought such things were pessimists at best, and bigots at worst. Ryan considered himself a realist, and for this reason he didn’t run out into the street to praise the rapid change.

  The extremists were out in force. With the disappearance of the Emir nearly a year earlier, all over the map the terrorists were shifting safe houses, allegiances, occupations, and even host nations.

  One thing hadn’t changed, though. Ground zero for the entire jihadist movement was still Pakistan. Thirty years ago, all the fledgling jihadists of the world flocked there to fight the Russians. Every male kid in the Islamic world past the age of puberty was offered a gun and an express ticket to paradise. Every boy younger than that was offered a place in a madrassa, a religious school that fed them and clothed them and gave them a community, but the madrassas set up in Pakistan taught only extremist beliefs and war-fighting skills. These skills were handy for the students, as these children were just being made ready to send into Afghanistan to fight the Russians, but the skill sets they’d learned, along with the madrassas’ promotion of jihad, didn’t leave them many options when the Russians left.

  It was inevitable that when the Soviets quit Afghanistan, the hundreds of thousands of armed and angry jihadists in Pakistan would become an incredible thorn in the side of the government there. And it was equally inevitable that these armed and angry jihadists would push into the vacuum that was post-Soviet Afghanistan.

  And thus began the story of the Taliban, which created the safe haven for Al-Qaeda, which brought Western coalition forces over a decade earlier.

  Ryan sipped his coffee, tried to focus his thoughts back on his duties and away from the big geopolitical issues that governed all. When his dad made it back into the White House, then his dad would have all that to worry about. Junior, on the other hand, had to deal with the comparatively tiny day-to-day ramifications of all those big problems. Small stuff, like ID’ing some mutt for Sam and Dom. They had e-mailed him another batch of pictures for him to look at. Pictures including some of the unknown Pakistani who had met with el Daboussi the day before.

  Ryan forwarded that e-mail to Tony Wills, the analyst who worked in the cubicle next to Jack’s. Tony would work on ID’ing the subject. For now, Jack knew he needed to concentrate on the other team in the field, John Clark and Domingo Chavez.

  Ding and John were in Europe at the moment, in Frankfurt, and they were mulling over their options. They’d spent the last two days preparing a surveillance operation to monitor an Al-Qaeda banker who would be heading into Luxembourg for some meetings, but the man canceled his trip from Islamabad at the last minute. The men were all dressed up with no place to go, so Jack decided he’d spend some time this morning digging deeper into the background of the European bankers the URC man planned on meeting with, in the hopes of getting a fresh lead for his colleagues in Europe to check out before they packed up and came home.

  For this reason, Jack had rolled in to work much earlier than usual. He did not want them to return with nothing to show for their trip; it was his responsthe his reibility to feed them the intel they needed to find the bad guys, and he’d spend the next few hours trying to find them some bad guys.

  He scanned through the XITS and a proprietary software program created by Gavin Biery, The Campus’s head of IT. Gavin’s catcher program searched data strings following the wishes of the analysts here at The Campus. It allowed them to filter out much of the intelligence that was not relevant to their current projects, and for Jack this software had been a godsend.

  Ryan opened a series of files with clicks of his mouse. While he did this, he marveled at the number of tidbits of intelligence that were coming on a one-way street from U.S. allies these days.

  It depressed him a little, not because he didn’t want America’s allies to share intel; rather, he was bothered because, these days, it was not a two-way street.

  To most in the U.S. intelligence community, it was an outrageous scandal that President Edward Kealty and his political appointees in top intelligence posts had spent the past four years degrading the U.S.’s abilities to unilaterally spy on other countries. Kealty and his people had instead shifted the focus of intelligence gathering, relying not on America’s own robust spy services but instead relying on the intelligence services in foreign nations to provide information to the CIA. This was safer politically and diplomatically, Kealty correctly determined, although diminishing America’s spy services was unsafe in every other respect. The administration had all but precluded nonofficial cover operators from working in allied nations, and CIA clandestine-services people functioning in overseas embassies found themselves hamstrung with even more rules and regs, which made the already difficult dance of their work nearly impossible.

  The Kealty administration had promised more “openness” and “transparency” in the clandestine CIA. Jack Junior’s father had written an op-ed in The Washington Post that suggested, in a manner that was still respectful to the office of the presidency, that Ed Kealty might want to look up the word clandestine in the dictionary.

  Kealty’s intel appointees had eschewed human intelligence, instead stressing signals intelligence and electronic intelligence. Spy satellites and drones were far, far safer from a diplomatic standpoint, so the
se technologies were implemented more than ever. Needless to say, longtime CIA HUMINT specialists complained, quite rightly saying that although drones do a spectacular job showing us the top of an enemy’s head, they were inferior to human assets, who often could tell us what was inside the enemy’s head. But these HUMINT proponents were seen by many as dinosaurs, and their arguments were ignored.

  Oh, well, Ryan thought. Dad will be in charge in a few months, he was sure of it, and he hoped most or all of the damage done could be undone during his father’s four-year term.

  He pushed these thoughts out of his head so he could concentrate, and he took a long swig of quickly cooling coffee to help his still-sleepy mind focus. He kept clicking on the one-way overnight intelligence haul, paying special attention to Europe, as that was where Chavez and Clark were right now.

  Wait. Here was something new. Ryan opened a file that sat in the inbox of an analyst at CIA’s OREA, the Office of Russian and European Analysis. Jack scanned it quickly, but something piqued his interest, so he went back and read it word for word. Apparently someone at DCRI, the French internal security arm, was letting a colleague at CIA know that they’d gotten a tip that a “person oy “perf interest” would be arriving at Charles de Gaulle that afternoon. Not a big deal in itself, and certainly not something that would have been pushed into one of Jack’s queries on its own, except for a name. The French intelligence source, not described in the message to CIA but likely some form of SIGINT or HUMINT, gave them reason to suspect the POI, a man only known to the French as Omar 8, was a recruiter for the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. DCRI heard he would touch down at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 1:10 that afternoon on an Air France flight from Tunis, and then he would be picked up by local associates and taken to an apartment in Seine-Saint-Denis, not far from the airport.