The Kill List (10 page)

“Joe,” said the Tracker quietly, “use your mobile to ask our driver to come knock on the door.”

“But he’ll be waiting outside.”

“Do as I ask, please.”

The junior staffer made the call. Mrs. Shah did not understand a word. A few seconds later, there was a sharp rap on the front door. Mrs. Shah looked alarmed. Not her husband; too early, and he would simply enter. No other visitors were expected. She rose, looked helplessly around, pulled open a drawer in the credenza by the wall and pushed the photo into it. The door knocker rapped again. She left the room.

The Tracker was across it in two strides. He removed the photo and snapped it twice with his iPhone. By the time Mrs. Shah returned with their puzzled driver, her older visitor was back in his chair, the younger one standing bewildered by him. The Tracker rose with a warm smile.

“Ah, time to go, I see. I have a plane to catch. I am so sorry to have missed your husband. Please give him my best regards and my apologies for upsetting him.”

This was all translated, and they saw themselves out. When they were gone, Mrs. Shah retrieved her precious photo and returned it to her secret place.

In the car to the airport, the Tracker expanded the picture and stared at it. He was not a cruel man and did not want to deceive the once-beautiful woman with the jade green eyes. But how, he mused, do you tell a mother still crying for her lost baby boy that you are going to hunt him down and kill him for the monster he has become?

Twenty hours later, he touched down at Washington Dulles.

• • •

T
he Tracker crouched in the tiny space available to him in the attic of the small house in Centerville and stared at the screen. Beside him, Ariel sat in front of his keyboard, as a pianist before his concert grand. He was in total control; through the equipment TOSA had donated him, the whole world was his.

His fingers flickered over the keys, and images came and went as he explained what he had done.

“Troll’s Internet traffic is coming out of here,” he said.

The images were from Google Earth, but he had somehow enhanced them. From space, the watcher plunged downward like aerial daredevil Felix Baumgartner diving to Earth. The Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa filled the screen, then seemed to rush past his ears as the camera roared down and down. Eventually, it halted its insane dive, and he was staring at a roof; square, pale gray. There seemed to be a courtyard and a gate. Two vans were parked in the yard.

“He’s not in Yemen, as you might have thought, he’s in Somalia. This is Kismayo, on the coast at the southern end of the country,” said Ariel.

Tracker stared, fascinated. They had all been wrong—CIA, TOSA, Counter-Terrorism Center—to think their quarry had emigrated from Pakistan to Yemen. He had probably been there but had moved on to seek sanctuary not with the AQAP, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but with the fanatics controlling AQHA. Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, formerly called al-Shabaab, which controlled the southern half of Somalia, among the wildest countries in the world.

There was much to research. So far as he knew, Somalia, outside the guarded enclave surrounding the token capital Mogadishu, was virtually out of bounds since the slaughter of eighteen Rangers in the incident known as Black Hawk Down, which was die-stamped onto the American military memory—and not in a pleasant way.

If Somalia had any fame at all, it was for the pirates who for ten years had been hijacking ships off the coast and ransoming vessels, cargoes and crews for millions of dollars. But the pirates were in the north, in Puntland, a great and desolate wilderness peopled by clans and tribes that the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton had once termed “the most savage people in the world.”

Kismayo was in the deep south, two hundred miles north of the Kenyan border; in colonial days a thriving Italian trade center, now a teeming slum ruled by Jihadi fanatics more extreme than any others in Islam.

“Do you know what that building is?” he asked Ariel.

“No. A warehouse, a large shed, I don’t know. But that is where the Troll operates the fan base. That is where his computer is located.”

“Does he know you know?”

The young man smiled quietly.

“Oh, no. He never spotted me. He is still running the fan base. He would have shut down if he knew I was watching him.”

The Tracker backed out of the loft and eased himself down the ladder to the landing below. He would have it all transferred to TOSA. He would have a UAV, a drone, circling silently and invisibly over that shed within days, watching, listening for any cyberspace whisper, sensing body-heat movements, photographing comings and goings. It would transmit everything it saw in real time to screens at Air Force Base Creech, Nevada, or Tampa, Florida, and thence to TOSA. Meanwhile, there was much to do with what he had brought back from Islamabad.

• • •

T
he Tracker stared for hours at the photograph he had swiped from the picture treasured by Mrs. Ali Shah. He had had the laboratory enhance the quality until it was pin sharp. He looked at the two smiling faces and wondered where they were now. The one on the right was irrelevant. It was the boy with amber eyes whom he studied, as in World War Two General Montgomery had studied the face of Rommel, the German Desert Fox, trying to imagine what he would do next.

The boy in the photograph was seventeen. That was before he converted to ultra-Jihadism, before 9/11, before Quetta, before he walked out on his family and went to live with the killers of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the 313 Brigade and the Haqqani clan.

The experiences, the hatred, the inevitable killings witnessed, the harsh life in the mountains of the Tribal Agencies—all that would have aged the face of the laughing boy.

The Tracker sent a clear picture of the Preacher now, masked though he was, and the left-hand side of the picture from Islamabad to a very specialist unit. At the Criminal Justice Information Services, an FBI facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, there is a laboratory that is expert in aging faces.

He asked them to give him a face—the face of now. Then he went to see Gray Fox.

The director of TOSA examined the evidence with approval. At last they had a name. They would soon have a face. They had a country, maybe even a city.

“Do you think he lives there, in that warehouse in Kismayo?” he asked.

“I doubt it. He has a paranoia about being elusive. I would bet he resides elsewhere, records his sermons in a single room with a camcorder, backed by a bedsheet-sized backdrop inscribed with the usual Koranic verses as we see on the screen, then lets his assistant, the one we now call the Troll, take it away and transmit it from Kismayo. He’s not in any trap yet, not by a long shot.”

“So what next?”

“I need a UAV over that warehouse on virtually permanent station. I’d ask for a low-flying mission to take side-on pictures of that building to see if there is a company name on it, except for one thing. I believe it would be a waste of time. But I have to identify who owns it.”

Gray Fox stared at the image from space. It was clear enough, but military technology would be able to count the rivets in the roof from 50,000 feet.

“I’ll get on to the drone boys. They have launch facilities in Kenya to the south, Ethiopia to the west, Djibouti to the north, and the CIA has a very covert unit inside the Mogadishu enclave. You’ll get your pictures. Now that you have his face, which he seems so keen to keep covered, and his name, are you going to blow his cover away?”

“Not yet. I have another idea.”

“Your call, Tracker. Go for it.”

“One last thing. I could ask, but the weight of J-SOC behind it would be helpful. Does the CIA or anyone else have a secret agent buried inside South Somalia?”

• • •

A
week later, four things happened. Tracker had spent the time steeping himself in the tragic story of Somalia. Once, it had been three regions. French Somaliland in the far north was now Djibouti, still with a strong French influence, a resident Foreign Legion garrison and a huge American base whose rent was crucial to the economy. Also in the north, former British Somaliland was now just Somaliland, also quiet, peaceful, even democratic, but bizarrely unrecognized as a nation/state.

The bulk was former Italian Somaliland, confiscated after World War Two, administered for a while by the British and then given independence. After a few years of the usual dictatorship, the once thriving and elegant colony where wealthy Italians used to vacation had lapsed into civil war. Clan fought clan, tribe fought tribe, warlord after warlord sought supremacy. Finally, with Mogadishu and Kismayo just seas of rubble, the outside world had given up.

A belated notoriety had returned when the beggared fishermen of the north turned to piracy and the south to Islamic fanaticism. Al-Shabaab had arisen not as an offshoot but an ally of al-Qaeda and conquered all of the south. Mogadishu hovered as a fragile token capital of a corrupt regime living on aid but in an encircled enclave whose border was guarded by a mixed army of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Burundians.

Inside the wall of guns, foreign money poured into aid projects, and various spooks scuttled about pretending to be something else.

As the Tracker read, head in hands, or studied images on the plasma screen in his office, an RQ-4 Global Hawk took up station over Kismayo. It was not weaponized, for that was not the mission. It was known as a HALE version, for high altitude, long endurance.

It came out of the nearby Kenyan facility, where a few American soldiers and technicians sweltered in the tropical heat, resupplied by air and dwelling in air-conditioned housing units like a film crew on location. They had four Global Hawks and two were now airborne.

One had been aloft before the new request arrived. The job was watching the Kenya/Somali border and the offshore waters for raids and incursions over the border. The new order was to circle over a once commercial zone in Kismayo and watch a building. As the Hawks would have to spell each other, that meant all four were now operational.

The Global Hawk has an extraordinary “loiter time” of thirty-five hours. Being close to its base, it could circle above its target for thirty hours. At 60,000 feet, almost twice the height of an airliner, it could scan up to 40,000 square miles a day. Or it could narrow that beam to four square miles and zoom in for pin-sharp clarity.

The Hawk over Kismayo was equipped with synthetic-aperture radar, electro-optical and infrared for night and day, clear or cloud, operation. It could also “listen” to the tiniest transmission on the lowest possible power and “sniff” changing heat centers as humans moved about below. All intelligence gathered went straight to Nevada in a nanosecond.

The second thing that happened was the return of the pictures from Clarksburg. The technicians there had noticed that on the masked images off the TV, the fabric of the mask seemed to be slightly bulked out from the face beneath. They theorized there could be a full black beard under there. So they sent two alternates, with and without beard.

They had the creases across the forehead and those around the eyes to work on, so the updated face was markedly older. And hard. There was a cruelty about the mouth and jaw. The boy’s softness and merriment was gone.

Hardly had Tracker finished studying the new photos than a message came from Ariel.

“There seems to be a second computer in that building,” he said. “But it is not emitting the sermons. Whoever is on it, and I think it is the Troll, has acknowledged receipt with thanks. No indication of what. But someone else is communicating by e-mail with that building.”

And Gray Fox came back. A total negative. No one has any “asset” living among the al-Shabaab.

“The message seems to be: If you want to go into that hellhole, you’re on your own.”

H
e should have thought of it while he was in Islamabad and mentally kicked himself for the oversight. Javad, the CIA’s mole inside the ISI, had told him the young Zulfiqar Ali Shah had vanished off all radar screens by 2004 after disappearing into Lashkar-e-Taiba, the anti-Kashmir terror group.

Since then—nothing. But nothing under that name. It was only when staring at the face in his office that another line occurred to him. He asked the CIA to recontact Javad with a simple query: Did any of their agents inside the various terror groups along the deadly frontier hear mention of a terrorist with amber eyes?

Meanwhile, he had another call to make with the same request he had vainly put to Langley.

He took an official car again but this time went in a civilian suit with shirt and tie. Since 9/11, the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue has also been heavily protected. The grandiose building stands next to the Naval Observatory, home of the Vice President and also heavily guarded.

Access to the embassy avoids the columned portico at the front and is achieved down a small street to one side. His car stopped at the hut beside the barrier pole, and he offered his pass through the car’s open window. There was a consultation by handheld phone. Whatever the reply, it was enough for the pole to be lifted and the car to roll into the small parking lot. Less important creatures park outside and enter on foot. Space is scarce.

The door was much less grand than the front entrance, for security reasons now hardly used and only then by the ambassador and American visitors of exalted rank. Once inside, Tracker turned to the glass-windowed booth and again offered his identity card. It mentioned a certain Col. James Jackson.

Another phone conference, then the invitation to take a seat. Within two minutes, the elevator door opened and a young man emerged, evidently a junior in the pecking order.

“Colonel Jackson?” There was no one else in the lobby. He, too, examined the ID card. “Please come with me, sir.”

It was, as Tracker knew it would be, the fifth floor, the defense attachés’ floor, the level the American cleaning staff never entered. Cleaning had to be done by the lowest, albeit British, forms of life.

On the fifth floor, the young man led Tracker down a corridor past several door plaques announcing the inhabitants, and finally to a door with no marking but with a card-swipe mechanism instead of a handle. He knocked and on the command from inside swiped the card, swung the door open and gestured Tracker to enter. He did not follow but quietly closed the door.

It was an elegant room, with bulletproof windows giving onto the avenue. It was an office but definitely not the “bubble,” which was where conferences only of cosmic clearance level took place. That room was in the center of the building, surrounded on all sides, including floor and ceiling, by a vacuum and without windows. The technique of beaming a ray onto window glass and reading the conversation inside from the vibrations had been used against the American embassy in Moscow during the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

The man coming around the corner of his desk, hand outstretched, was also in a suit with a striped tie that Tracker, after his years in London, presumed to be the hallmark of a rather good school. He was not quite expert enough to recognize the colors of Harrow.

“Colonel Jackson? Welcome. Our first meet, I think. Konrad Armitage. I took the liberty of ordering coffee. How do you take it?”

He could have asked one of the glamorous young secretaries employed on that floor to enter from the side door and serve it but chose to do so himself. Recently arrived from London, Konrad Armitage was the head of station for the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.

He knew perfectly well who his visitor was from his predecessor and welcomed the meeting. The awareness of common cause, common interest and common enemy was mutual.

“So, what can I do for you?”

“An odd request but brief. I could have sent it the usual way, but I figured we probably ought to meet one day anyway so I just cut to the chase.”

“Quite right. And the request?”

“Does your service have a contact or, better still, an asset buried down among the al-Shabaab in Somalia?”

“Wow. That’s an odd one, all right. Not my specialty. We have a desk, of course. I’ll have to ask. May I inquire: Is it the Preacher?”

Armitage was no clairvoyant. He knew who the Tracker was and what he did. Britain had just had its fourth murder committed by a young fanatic inspired by the online sermons of the Preacher, as opposed to America’s six, and both services knew how their governments wanted to put an end to this man.

“Could be,” said the Tracker.

“Well, excellent, then. As you know, we have a presence, as do your friends at Langley, inside Mogadishu, but if they have anyone out in the wild places, I’d be surprised if they haven’t proposed a joint operation. But I’ll have the request in the London office by morning.”

The reply took only two days, but it was the same as that from the CIA. And Armitage was right: If either country was running a source inside South Somalia, it would have been too valuable not to share—both the costs and the “product.”

The reply from Javad inside the ISI was much more helpful. One of those to whom he pretended to report back about his spying on the Americans was a contact in the notorious S Wing, which “covered,” in every sense, myriad groups dedicated to Jihadism and violence that inhabited the border strip from Kashmir to Quetta.

It would have been far too risky for Javad to have asked outright; it would have blown his cover and revealed his true employers. But part of his ISI job was to have authorized access to the Americans and to frequent their company. He pretended he had eavesdropped on a conversation between diplomats at a cocktail party. Out of curiosity, the S Wing officer consulted the archive database, and Javad, standing behind him, noted the file he accessed.

When he had shut down, the S Wing officer ordered that the Yankees be told there was no such trace. Later, by night, Javad reaccessed the database and punched up the file.

There was such a mention but years old. It came from an ISI spy in Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade of fanatics and killers. It mentioned a new arrival from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a fanatic for whom the raids against Kashmir had proved too tame. The young recruit spoke Arabic and Pashto, which was what had facilitated his acceptance into 313. The Brigade was composed mainly of Arabs and cooperated closely with the Pashto-speaking Haqqani clan. The report added that this was his usefulness, but he had yet to prove himself as a fighter. He had amber eyes, and styled himself Abu Azzam.

So that was why he had disappeared nine years ago. He had changed his terror group and changed his name.

The U.S.’s Counter-Terrorism Center has a vast database on Jihadist terror groups, and punching in Abu Azzam produced a cornucopia.

Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, there were seven great warlords who comprised the Mujahideen, applauded and supported by the West as “patriots,” “partisans” and “freedom fighters.” To them, and them alone, went the huge quantities of money and weapons channeled into the Afghan mountains to defeat the Russians. But the moment the last Soviet tank rolled back into Russia, two of them reverted to the vicious killers they had always been. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the other was Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Though a warlord and master of his native province of Paktia, Haqqani switched sides when the Taliban swept the warlords aside and came to power and he became commander of the Taliban forces.

After their defeat by the Americans and Northern Alliance, he moved again, crossing the border and setting himself up in Waziristan, inside the Pakistan border. Succeeded by his three sons, he created the Haqqani network; basically, the Pakistani Taliban.

This became a hub for terror strikes against American and NATO forces over the border and against the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, which became an ally of the U.S. He attracted to his network the remaining al-Qaeda forces not dead or in jail and any other Jihadist fanatic. One of these was Ilyas Kashmiri, who brought with him his 313 Brigade, part of the Shadow Army.

What the Tracker could surmise was that the fanatical and eager-to-rise Zulfiqar Ali Shah, now calling himself Abu Azzam, was among them.

What he could not know was that Abu Azzam, while avoiding going into mortal danger in raids into Afghanistan, developed a taste for killing and became the 313 Brigade’s most enthusiastic executioner.

One by one, the leading figures of Haqqani, Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Brigade were identified by the Americans, located with local information and targeted for drone strikes. In those mountain fastnesses, they were immune to army attack, as Pakistan discovered with huge losses, but could not hide for long from the UAVs, endlessly patrolling over their heads, soundless, invisible, watching everything, photographing everything and listening to everything.

The HVTs, the high-value targets, were blown to pieces, replaced by others, who were, in turn, blown away, until leadership became virtually a sentence of death.

But the old links with S Wing of Pakistan’s ISI never died. The ISI had created the Taliban in the first place and never lost sight of a single prediction: The Yankees have the clocks, but the Afghans have the time. One day, they calculated, the Americans will pack up and go. The Taliban might well retake Afghanistan, and Pakistan does not want two enemies, India and Afghanistan, on her borders. One will be enough, and that will be India.

There was one more chapter in the mass of data that the Tracker had unleashed. The 313 Brigade, with its leaders, including Kashmiri, blasted into infinity, ebbed away but was replaced by the even more fanatic and sadistic Khorosan, and Abu Azzam was at the heart of it.

Khorosan was no more than two hundred and fifty ultras, mostly Arabs and Uzbeks, targeted at the local natives who were selling information to U.S.-paid agents, particularly the whereabouts of the top targets. Khorosan had no talent for gathering its own intelligence, but a limitless capacity to terrify by public torture.

Whenever a drone-launched missile wiped out a house containing a terror leader, the Khorosan would arrive to snatch a sample of local citizens and inflict so-called courts, preceded by extreme interrogation involving electric shocks, electric drills or red-hot irons. The court would be presided over by an imam or mullah, often self-styled. Confessions were almost guaranteed and sentences other than death exceptional.

The habitual method of death was throat cutting. The merciful procedure involves the knife penetrating from the side, razor edge forward. A quick slice outward will open the jugular vein, carotid artery, trachea and esophagus, bringing instant death.

But a goat is not killed that way because maximum blood loss is needed to tenderize the meat. Then the throat is opened by a hacking, seesawing motion from the front. To make a human prisoner suffer and to demonstrate contempt, the goat method is used.

Having passed sentence, the presiding priest would then sit and watch it carried out. One of them was Abu Azzam.

There was one more item in the file. About 2009, a roaming preacher began to sermonize in the mosques along the peaks of North and South Waziristan. The CTC file gave him no name, saying only that he spoke Urdu, Arabic and Pashto and was a most powerful orator who could bring his audiences to extremes of religious exultation. Then, about 2010, he vanished. He had never been heard of in Pakistan since.

• • •

T
he two men sitting in the corner of the bar of the Washington Mandarin Oriental attracted no attention. There was no reason why they should. Both were early to mid-forties, both in dark suits with white shirt and neutral tie. Both looked lean and hard, slightly military, with that indefinable air that says “Been in combat.”

One was the Tracker. The other had introduced himself as Simon Jordan. He did not like to meet with complete strangers inside the embassy if it could just as well be done outside. Hence the meeting in the discreet bar.

Back in his home country, his first name was really Shimon, and his surname had nothing to do with any river. He was the head of station of the Mossad in the Israeli embassy.

The Tracker’s request was the same as he had placed with Konrad Armitage and the result was much the same. Simon Jordan also knew perfectly well who the Tracker was, what TOSA really did and, as an Israeli, thoroughly approved of both. But he did not have any answer at his fingertips.

“Of course, there is someone back home at the Office who will cover that part of the world, but I will have to put the question to him. You are, I suppose, in a hurry?”

“I’m an American. Are we ever anything else?”

Jordan laughed with genuine appreciation. He liked self-deprecation. Very Israeli.

“I’ll ask at once and request no delay.” He held up the card in the name of Jackson that the Tracker had given him. “I suppose this is a secure number?”

“Very.”

“Then I’ll use it. And on one of our secure lines.”

He knew perfectly well that the Americans would listen to anything coming out of the Israeli embassy, but allies try to maintain the courtesies.

They parted. The Israeli had a car waiting, with a driver at the wheel. It would take him to the door. He did not like to be ostentatious, but he was “declared,” which meant he might be recognized. Driving himself or taking a cab was not a wise way of avoiding a kidnap. Having a former Golani Brigade commando at the wheel and an Uzi in the back was better. On the other hand, he did not, like an “undeclared,” have to go through a lot of rigmarole involving double-backs and side entrances.

The Tracker, among his other habits that raised official eyebrows, did not like a chauffeur-driven car if he could avoid it. Nor did he like to spend hours in the gridlocks between downtown D.C. and his office in the forest. He used a motorcycle, with helmet and visor in a pannier under the seat. But it was not a rolling armchair; it was a Honda Fireblade, a transport with which there is not much point in arguing.