Counterplay Read online

  Richard and Zak were outnumbered twenty to two. The Inzar Ghar defense squad was in no mood to barter as they had just lost six of their colleagues (the demise of Hamani was not an event of consequence).

  “Turbee,” Richard hissed through his lapel mic, “where did these guards come from?”

  Turbee didn’t answer—not that it would have made any difference.

  “Okay, Richard,” said Zak. “There’s twenty of them and only half have RPGs. We should be able to take them on.”

  “Don’t think so, Zak. Either our air cover shows up or we’re done.”

  “So, Shayam,” said the squadron leader, smirking at Zak. “You have come to take away our Kumar? Yousseff will not be pleased. But at least we can tell him you are no longer an irritant. Go burn in hell.”

  As the leader raised his hand to signal his men to fire, there was a roar of flame, a fiery explosion that knocked Richard, Zak, and Kumar back into the building they had just exited. They lay in the remnants of the Inzar Ghar foyer as the screams of the men from the garrison cut through the air.

  “Holy shit, we’re not dead,” Zak said.

  “What was that?” Richard exlaimed, winded from the force of the impact.

  “I think it was a Hellfire missile. Maybe from the Stealth Hawk, maybe from one of our drones, but the cavalry came in the nick of time, Rich.” “What just happened?” came Turbee’s voice over the comm-link.

  “Turbee,” said Richard, “we were surrounded by the Inzar Ghar garrison. They were about ready to execute us when someone nailed them with a Hellfire missile. We maybe had a second before we were done.” “Nice save, little buddy,” said Zak.

  “Guys,” Turbee replied, “that wasn’t me. That wasn’t us. I don’t know who fired that missile.”

  “Well, someone was listening in and came to the rescue. Could have been someone at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. They run the MQ-9 program,” said Richard. “Whoever it was, send them roses.”

  Zak turned to Richard. “Let’s hustle out of here. There may be more of these guys. We’ve got to get back to the Stealth Hawk and drop off Kumar, and maybe have a cup of tea with Ambassador Buckingham at the Islamabad embassy before we go back home.”

  “I’m with you, bro. The faster we get out of Inzar Ghar the happier I’ll be.”

  Ten minutes later all three were on board, and the Stealth Hawk made a beeline for Islamabad.

  4

  Someone, somehow, had broken Kumar Hanaman out of Inzar Ghar. This seemingly inconsequential fact had created a towering thundercloud of anxiety within the Oval Office. There was no ambiguity in the president’s directive as he sent his advisors, aides, and secretaries scurrying throughout Washington, DC. “Find out who the hell did it. Get Hanaman back in custody. Kill him if you have to.”

  It was now past midnight in the dimly lit Oval Office. The airconditioning hissed. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a siren cut through the night. The briefing had lasted an hour. All were dismissed but for the president’s most trusted advisors: Calvin Jones, Dan Alexander, and Tyra Baylor. The president, Matthew Finnegan, had the remnants of a Big Mac lying in front of him and was sipping from a large, cold cup of franchise coffee. Finnegan, all six-foot-two of him, began as he often did when irate: softly and slowly. He would gradually increase in momentum and speed, a cattle train pulling out of a stockyard.

  “Do any of you have any idea what this could do to our strategic interests in Central Asia? We have the run of things in Afghanistan, which is pissing off the Chinese and the Russians to no end. We have that because Yousseff permitted us to have that. Kumar Hanaman could destroy that. All he has to do is to get in front of a TV camera . . . .”

  “Worse. Try a cell phone and a Twitter account,” Tyra interrupted. “Or a Facebook page.”

  Tyra, early forties, corrosive but brilliant, had no official position in the administration other than “medical and/or security advisor,” although the West Wing crew had many other descriptors. She had served with distinction as a special operations combat medic for almost thirteen years, and then spent six years with the CIA. She had come to know the president when he was goose-stepping his way through Alabama state politics.

  “It could end this presidency,” said Calvin Jones, the secretary of defense. The short, rotund, balding, red-faced man preferred to be called “CJ.” He had followed the president since high school, through five tumultuous years at the University of Alabama, and thereafter (somehow), to an Ivy League law school. CJ was the president’s political fixer-in-chief. When things went sideways, he mopped up and minimized the damage. Sanitizing the mayhem that flowed in the president’s wake had been CJ’s purpose for more than four decades. Tyra fixed the things that CJ couldn’t.

  “Tyra, talk to our media people,” said the president. “Get ahead of the story. Make sure the world knows that Kumar is a small-town terrorist with a drinking problem. Slam him hard. If we don’t get to him first, let’s at least destroy his credibility before he appears on someone’s radar screen.”

  “He can unhinge a lot more than Afghanistan,” CJ added. “A hell of a lot more.”

  The president nodded in agreement. The atmosphere was dense and heavy as another cloud of silence hung over the meeting. Tyra shook her head. “Sir, we cannot have someone like Kumar running around, anywhere. The risk is huge. We have to take him out.”

  Dan Alexander, whom the president had appointed as the director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, or TTIC as it was colloquially known, agreed. “Yousseff will be furious about this. We will not be able to cut any deal with him as long as Kumar is on the loose.” Dan, with much inherited wealth, had been a staunch financial supporter of the president.

  “Who did it?” CJ asked.

  “Well that’s another problem,” said the president. “It was someone within our own military. Someone in our armed forces went rogue.” “What?” CJ looked perplexed.

  The commander-in-chief looked at his advisors, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, nodded. Another minute ticked by. “It’s obvious that this is an inside job. They all suggested it. They flapped all around it. None of them came right out and said it. But to me, it’s obvious. Someone in the military has their own agenda.”

  “I agree,” Tyra said. “Internal. Our own people. Our own Special Forces, perhaps. We will know more by this time tomorrow. But someone in our military has gone rogue.”

  “How can you be so sure about this?” CJ asked.

  “There was a communications link set up,” Tyra said. “A very sophisticated one. Drones and satellites were used. From my time in Delta Force, this would have been impossible to do without internal cooperation. There would be too many people involved. And it would need to be at a high level. This should not be hard to figure out.”

  “To organize a comm-link like that would involve the cooperation of several government agencies,” said Dan. “Which means someone at my level, the director level, could not do it. It’s been organized at a higher level than that.”

  “What level would that be?” questioned the president.

  “The deputy director of intelligence,” said CJ.

  “And who is the DDI these days?”

  “Jackson,” said CJ. “Admiral Jackson.”

  The president reflected on that for a minute. “Jesus. Could the admiral himself have gone rogue? Pick him up,” he said to Tyra. “Pick him up and bring him to me. Next point,” he said, “what do we do with those damned conspiracy theorists? The Kumar escape could play into that. It certainly would if Kumar began to talk.”

  The conspiracy websites spelled out a theory of the Colorado terror attack that was inconsistent with the findings of the Colorado Commission. This commission, chaired by the secretary of defense himself, was specifically set up to investigate the attack, how it occurred, and what could be learned from it, in the hope that attacks like it could be prevented in the future. The commission’s key finding was that the attack was perp
etrated by a Canadian, Leon Lestage, and a number of drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Neither Yousseff Said al-Sabhan nor Kumar Hanaman were mentioned in the report. The drug lords who were named were all competitors of Yousseff’s drug smuggling operations. One of the kingpins of the plot was allegedly Leon Lestage, currently on trial in a court in Canada. The evidence was insurmountable and clear.

  “Our communications team can handle it,” said Tyra. “It’s easy to paint them as lunatics. Flat earthers. Some of the people at the front of the movement are downright certifiable. For every website they put up, we put up two. Our polling indicates that most of the country thinks they’re nuts. We can out-fake them.”

  “Dan, some of this conspiracy stuff seems to be coming out of your agency. You know, that little weirdo, Hamilton Turbee, and that bully he hangs with, George Lexia. Some of our intelligence points to them authorizing some of those websites. Can’t you put an end to that?”

  “They deny it,” said Dan. “I’ve spoken to them both. I’m not sure it was them. What do you think, Tyra?”

  “Unable to say,” Tyra replied. “Those guys are good at covering their tracks. But my gut says Turbee and George Lexia are involved. Dan, if they continue to piss us off, fire them. If that doesn’t straighten them out, just shoot the bastards. We should not be wasting our time and resources worrying about a couple of social misfit hackers. We have a serious issue here, with Kumar at large. We need to be focusing on that.”

  “I guess we’re done here for today,” said CJ, looking at his watch. “We should connect on this again tomorrow.” He and Dan stood up and left, the door quietly swinging shut behind them.

  “Pour me a shot of Jack, Tyra,” said the president, interlocking his hands behind his head and stretching luxuriously. “Stick around for a bit.”

  “For sure, Matt,” she said quietly. “For sure.”

  5

  It was ten in the morning when the Jeep rolled to a halt in front of the American embassy in Islamabad and disgorged Richard and Zak with their prisoner, Kumar Hanaman. Ambassador Michael Buckingham was waiting for them.

  “We’ve got him. Kumar Hanaman himself,” Zak said, motioning his head toward the diminutive man who was still sandwiched between him and Richard.

  “Nice to be able to relax a bit, Mike,” Richard added. “We were involved in a nasty firefight at Inzar Ghar.”

  “Follow me, you two,” said Buckingham. “I’m not so sure about the relax thing.” He pointed to the two Marines guarding the embassy gate. “See that Kumar doesn’t go anywhere. Give us a few minutes.”

  As the three began walking toward the gated inner garden behind the main embassy structure, Richard turned to Buckingham. “Mike, what’s going on? If we can’t relax here, we can’t relax anywhere.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Buckingham said. “You can’t relax anywhere.”

  Both Richard and Zak stopped and turned to Buckingham. Zak gave Buckingham a penetrating stare. “Mike, you were stationed in this embassy when Richard and I were kids. We’ve known you for more than thirty years. If something is going down that affects us, we need to know.”

  Buckingham sighed and momentarily looked at the ground. “I received a phone call from the admiral about twenty minutes ago. Your cover is probably blown.”

  “What cover, Mike?” asked Richard. “This was a mission. The admiral gave the order to us personally. We were sent to Inzar Ghar because we know the place, and the language. He ordered us to spring Kumar and bring him here. I think they want him to testify in front of some bullshit Senate committee. That’s what we have done. A straightforward little operation.”

  “Guys, it was a rogue operation.”

  “What?” asked Zak. “A what?”

  “That platinum-plated gasbag in the White House ordered that Kumar was to remain in Inzar Ghar. Admiral Jackson and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Pershing, were directed not to spring Kumar Hanaman from Inzar Ghar. Specifically ordered not to, gentlemen. They disobeyed a direct order in breaking him out of prison.”

  “Aw, come on,” said Richard, shaking his head. “Kumar was the second in command in the Colorado terrorist attack. He built the devices that were used. He worked hand in glove with Yousseff. He will easily be able to show how all of it happened. I mean, we’re all totally pissed with that Colorado Commission BS. Yousseff’s role was deliberately ignored. He was not even mentioned. CJ in his report pretended that Yousseff and Kumar did not exist. Now that Kumar has had a change of heart, he will fix this for us.”

  “Yousseff is a friend of the White House,” Buckingham replied. “He’s powerful. They need him, I guess. They need him because they need Afghanistan. It’s pretty cynical.”

  “How can something like this be rogue at all?” asked Richard. “Look at the assets that were deployed. We’ve had that fancy stealth chopper, one of maybe three in existence. Drones were used. Satellites were used. A good half-a-dozen military installations were used to handle the communications on that comm-link. TTIC itself was used. How can something this big and complex possibly be rogue?”

  “Pershing is chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” replied Buckingham. “He can move aircraft carriers and nuclear subs around if he wants to. The admiral has got all kinds of whack around the Pentagon and Langley. And TTIC is involved. Reading between the lines, General Pershing and Admiral Jackson simply issued the orders. Those two are rock solid, and no one below them in the chain of command would have questioned it.

  “But here’s the political problem,” continued the ambassador. “Yousseff now practically runs the government in Afghanistan. Everyone there is on his payroll. He is a ‘close friend’ of the government leaders over there. He has allowed us to expand Bagram, and he is letting American companies in to mine the minerals in the foothills of the Kush. They have found huge fields of natural gas in the southwest corner of Afghanistan. American companies are developing it. American companies will build the pipelines. The USA desperately needs energy because of what happened on the Colorado. This is how they’re going to get that. The president does not want to undermine that. If Kumar has had some kind of attack of conscience and compromises Yousseff, the US will lose the inside track in Afghanistan. That is not a good thing.”

  “Yes. Sure, Mike,” Richard retorted. “But 20,000 people, almost all Americans, are dead.”

  “And we’ve got a more pressing problem.”

  “What’s that, Zak?”

  “If this is a rogue operation, and you just cautioned us about it, Mike, that makes you a part of the rogue operation.”

  “It’s more than that, Zak,” replied Buckingham. “Unless you turn Kumar over, now, that makes you two part of the rogue operation.”

  “And that means TTIC is part of the rogue operation,” Richard said.

  “And Turbee,” said Zak, quietly. “And Turbee.”

  “This thing is dirty, Mike,” Richard said. “This stinks. Yousseff walks and everyone from the admiral down to Turbee is rogue? There is no fucking way we are going to turn Kumar over. I say we scram, Zak, and take Kumar with us until we figure out what to do.”

  The ambassador was silent for a minute or more. Zak and Richard likewise did not speak. At length the ambassador sighed. “I’ve got a garage full of cars underneath the embassy. Why don’t you grab one and take off with

  Kumar. This thing may yet sort itself out.” “You game, bro?” asked Richard.

  “I’m game, Rich. Let’s grab a fast car and hit the motorway. You get one. I’ll get Kumar.”

  “I have a question for you, Mike,” Richard said as he was about to leave. “We were facing a life-and-death situation at Inzar Ghar. We were completely surrounded. Twenty or thirty of Yousseff’s guys with heavy weapons were between us and the gate. We were done. But then someone took them out. A Hellfire missile, or something like it, came out of nowhere, maybe a drone, and targeted them. Most were killed. We shot a few and waited for the chopper. Who fired the missile?�
��

  “I have no idea, Richard. I don’t think it was us. An easy solution to the problem would be to take out the three of you, or just wait for Yousseff’s soldiers to do it. They obviously want Kumar dead so he can’t spill the beans on Yousseff. But whoever that was helped you.”

  Zak shook his head. “Someone with enough pull was able to take out, with a Hellfire missile, some thirty men. DC probably wants Kumar, and probably Rich and I, dead. What the fuck is going on here?”

  “You never know what’s coming from inside the Beltway these days,” said the ambassador. “It’s like a hall of mirrors.”

  “Or a set of those nested Chinese boxes,” Richard added.

  6

  It took more than a year after the Colorado terrorist attack for the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, TTIC, to settle back into its normal rhythms. Turbee, more medicated than usual and under the careful collective scrutiny of a battery of specialists, returned to his station surrounded by a constellation of computers and screens.

  He was quieter than usual and had aged ten years. His physical wounds inflicted by thugs and overzealous police officers had mostly healed. His psyche, however, was still in tatters. He was on a far more complex cocktail of medications and he wobbled more than usual. Adding to the psychological wreckage was the guilt he carried, personally, for failing to stop the terrorist attack—guilt that no amount of counseling could assuage.

  It was well after midnight and Turbee was the only occupant of the center. The stunning control room had become legendary in the intelligence community. It was circular in design. The outer wall featured floor-to-ceiling video monitors, 303 inches along the diagonal that fit seamlessly together. Turbee had his favorite screen saver running: a 360-degree view taken from the peak of K2 slowly rotating around him. It took very little imagination to feel the chilling winds and see the stark precipices of the majestic peak.

  The center of the room featured a new, slightly convex circular screen, forty-five feet in diameter, called the atlas screen. Around the perimeter of the atlas screen were two concentric circles of workstations, forty in all, the outer circle being slightly higher than the inner. Any video stream from any camera in the world could be displayed there, from dashboard cams to the Mars rover. The atlas screen usually featured satellite or drone footage and functioned like a gigantic Google Earth with one critical difference. All the feeds were live. Turbee and George Lexia, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, were instrumental in creating the software that managed this system. With direct links to the NSA, both in Washington and its data warehouse in Utah, and a cluster of IBM octa-core supercomputers, it was the most sophisticated intelligence analysis center in the world.