The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (22 page)

The Indian subcontinent juts like a squat Ceylonese dagger deep into the heart of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a peninsula teeming with human beings and their works—the most densely populated coastline except that of China. Indians have always loved the sea, and the sea has loved India in return, providing her with wealth, food, and cheap transportation.

India has thirteen major seaports handling half a billion tons of cargo every year, and some 180 smaller ports. One of these minor harbors is Bharuch, the most ancient city in Gujarat, where the lethargic currents of the holy river Narmada swirl into the muddy Gulf of Cambey north of Mumbai.

A day after sailing from Karachi, the freighter
Nippon Yoku-Maru,
3,500 deadweight tons, a coastal vessel not much larger than three tugboats put end to end, pulled quietly alongside the Jageshwar Shipyard Jetty No. 2 in the brackish waters of the Narmada Estuary. She had made the uneventful voyage of 360 nautical miles from Karachi in 26 hours.

The Jageshwar Shipyard was a small, privately owned shipbuilding facility covering 35 acres with 1,600 feet of sea access, including dry docks and three jetties sticking out perpendicular to the muddy banks of the wide estuary. These were available for loading and offloading the nearly constant flow of scrap, parts, and construction materials related to projects underway at all hours of the day in the shipyard.

Founded by a local entrepreneur in the 1970s, Jageshwar employed 275 skilled employees and 1,200 unskilled contract laborers. The owners had them principally employed, on the day of the
Nippon Yoku-Maru’s
visit, on a highly lucrative project for the firm: the retrofitting of a vessel of 120,000 deadweight tons with new diesel engines and refurbishment of the superstructure and interior.

Twenty-three other smaller vessels were in varying stages of production, modernization, or conversion in other berths in the shipyard. A railway siding at the rear of the yard connected it to the central rail station fifteen miles away in downtown Bharuch, a small city of 150,000.

On any given day at Jageshwar Shipyard, twenty to thirty tons of parts, scrap, and matériel moved into or out of the shipyard via seagoing vessels at the jetties, railroad cars on the landward side of the yard, or semi trucks. The Narmada Estuary, one of the most industrialized areas of India, is served by, among others, Indian National Highway 8 connecting Mumbai to New Delhi, as well as by the Western Railway Division of the Indian National Railway.

For all this activity, because Jageshwar was not a commercial port facility, the Indian government did not have on site any customs or tax authorities. The shipyard was a reputable, well-respected business. It was not considered at risk for smuggling and so it was left supervised largely by its management, with monthly visits from government authorities to check on paperwork and collect fees and taxes.

The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
used her own onboard crane to offload three cargo containers from among the 59 on board the vessel. Two contained brass propeller blades and gearing necessary to connect them to the driveshafts of two of the vessels currently in the yard. They were expected. The third was a container shipped by Security Exports, S.A., officially destined for Jakarta. Though the clerk recording the cargo transfer for Jageshwar was expecting only two cargo containers, he simply assumed he had not yet been notified of the third. It had happened before, and the clerk knew that the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
had just sailed from Karachi, which was a major port of supply for the shipyard. Better to wait for the paperwork than refuse the shipment. He signed for all three containers. The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
left the jetty three hours after docking, without taking on fuel or new cargo.             

***

The following morning, seeing the third intermodal container still sitting on the jetty and suspecting now that it had been offloaded in error, the processing clerk at Jageshwar typed the standardized ISO 6346 Reporting Mark emblazoned on each end of the container into a computer registry maintained by BIC, the International Container Bureau in Paris. This code, which could be read automatically by a handheld device or typed in via a computer terminal, provides a unique visual identifier for all 200 million containers in circulation throughout the world. The Reporting Mark points to a unique serial number, the owner, a country code, and the size of the box. The BIC spit back the name of the shipper—Security Exports, S.A., and the destination: Jakarta, Indonesia.

Clearly, someone aboard the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
had screwed up. They had correctly offloaded the two containers destined for Jageshwar containing propeller parts, but then they offloaded in error a third container that should have been retained on board. Most likely, the offending container had been on top of the two boxes correctly destined and had to be moved. Instead, it was taken off the ship and left behind. It happened.

The clerk sent an urgent email to the Bharuch office of his shipping agent, Global-Modal Asia Limited, which had directed the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
to Jageshwar with the two containers of propeller blades and parts, telling the agent of the offloading error. Mistakes of this sort took place several times a year. In fact, his contact at Global-Modal had once told him that in spite of all the precautions built into the intermodal transport system, between one and two thousand intermodal containers actually
fell off
vessels worldwide every year, a total loss of $400 million annually sunk to the bottom of the oceans. Thousands more were mis-routed in the complex, labyrinthine maze of interconnected ships, trucks, trains, and yards that comprised the global intermodal network.

Fortunately, the BIC registry system was so efficient that almost all of these misrouted containers, unlike those lost at sea, were eventually recovered and correctly routed. Meanwhile, the misrouted container sat on the jetty under the hot rays of a subtropical Indian sun.

***

The local bureau of Global-Modal Asia Limited occupied the topmost floor of a dusty, mustard-colored five-storey office structure on Station Road, where it terminates at the Bharuch Railway Yard in the heart of central Bharuch, across from the Relax Cinema Hall. Junior Clerk Ashok Bhatt read the email from Jageshwar Shipyards minutes after it had been sent and endeavored to perform a calculation to determine the cheapest and quickest way to return the misplaced container at the shipyard into the vast global intermodal system and send it along to its correct destination. Bhatt discussed the matter with Babu Patel, his supervisor.

“It’s all a question of weight,” Patel said. He had taken the newly hired Bhatt under his wing and was teaching him the ropes. “It is weight which determines whether we have the option of trucking, or if we are limited only to rail or ship.”

Patel located some additional data about the container in his computer files.

“This container is practically empty, do you see?” he said. “It is rated at 9,450 pounds, of which 8,500 is the steel in the empty container itself.”

“So how do we get this one back on track?” Bhatt asked.

“This is not difficult. We truck it thirty miles to the Port of Magdalla and put it on board the next ship to Jakarta.”

“Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to let it sit in place until the next coastal freighter comes by Jageshwar?”

“If there were no fines for delay that might be true, but the clock is ticking my friend. Every day of delay reduces our fee. Cheapest way is almost always the way that minimizes time lost and therefore also late fees. This one is quite straightforward. This box will again be on the high seas by tomorrow noon.”

“Never did I dream I would ever have a model train set this big to play with!” Bhatt enthused, only half-joking. “This power to move anything anywhere in the world, it is truly astonishing.”

“Truly, my friend,” said Patel. “The most unheralded revolution in the twentieth century was the invention of this intermodal system that everyone takes for granted but us.”

Within 72 hours of the radiation alert at the port of Karachi, more than half of the potentially suspect containers had been tracked down, inspected, and declared safe.

Kate Langley called Mort Feldman in Islamabad to provide him with twice-daily updates. She had commandeered a spare desk at the U.S. Consulate.

“We may have identified the container that set off the alarm,” Kate said. “You won’t believe the culprit.”

“OK, I’ll bite—so tell me.”

“Bananas! Or rather, potassium in the bananas.”

“Cut it out, Kate. I’m not in a joking mood today.”

“And I’m not joking!” Kate protested. “Bananas are naturally radioactive because of the potassium-40 they contain. The port techs tell me that shipments of bananas regularly set off radiation alerts in ports all over the world. It has happened here.”

“So you’re telling me that we may be on a wild goose chase?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. The Security Exports designation is clearly Jacques LeClerc, so we know for sure that whatever LeClerc was doing in Moscow is linked to Global-Modal in Karachi. If nothing else, Al Qaeda planners are good systems analysts. In the intermodal shipping network they may have discovered the perfect nuclear weapons delivery system.”

“How is that?”

“Well, for starters, it’s virtually unmonitored. Fewer than two containers in one hundred are actually inspected anywhere along their route, and that’s in the United States. Here in Pakistan it’s less than one per cent, perhaps a tiny fraction of one per cent. Second, it’s incredibly cheap. It costs less than $4,000 to send a fully loaded 32-ton container from Karachi to Los Angeles. The average value of the goods in each container is $70,000, so a surcharge of about five per cent gets your merchandise all the way from Asia to the United States, even with high oil prices. Third, the volume of trade from Asia to the West is staggering. Tens of millions of containers a month. It’s the perfect public transportation vehicle for undetected bombs from the third world to Europe or the United States.”

“And I suppose that on days when the power is down or there is some other infrastructure problem, the folks in Karachi just open the gates and let everything through without any inspection at all?”

“That’s right. No one wants to block exports because of red tape. Pakistan is already way too poor as it is. It’s only rich Americans who put security before profit. And there were other containers that could have set off the alarm last week,” Kate added. “We found a shipment of ceramic tiles that was slightly radioactive, some granite kitchen countertops, and a shipment of clay, used for kitty litter. All more or less radioactive.”

“What have you done to inspect the Security Exports container?”

“Jeff Sikandar told me this morning that it was erroneously dropped off at a shipyard in India. One of his branch offices is trucking it to a nearby port there for re-routing back to Jakarta.”

There was a long pause on the telephone as Feldman digested this.

“So, whether by accident or design,” Feldman said at last, “you’re telling me that a shipment of arms has gotten across the Pakistan/India border? That’s just incredible.”

“Sikandar thinks it was an error, Mort. It’s under control here. Karachi police alerted the Indian port authorities in Bharuch, the nearest town. The container will be inspected in the next few hours.”

“Look, Kate, you absolutely need to drop everything you’re doing and get down there. That’s an order. What if the target was India all along? What if your bomb is on its way to New Delhi as we speak? A nuclear explosion in New Delhi, no matter what the cause, would bring about immediate and catastrophic retaliation against Pakistan. It might well trigger World War III. We’ve got to know what’s in that shipping container.”

***

India has a passel of intelligence services, far more in fact than any other large nation. They range from the Directorate of Income Tax Intelligence, whose sole purpose is to nail rich tax cheats, to the Signals Intelligence Directorate, which might best be described as India’s equivalent to the National Security Agency.

The organization in India that Pakistan’s ISI and America’s CIA work with as a sister external intelligence agency, and the agency principally concerned with counterterrorism and counterespionage, has the seemingly innocuous name of Research and Intelligence Wing (RAW). RAW is a civilian organization reporting to the Prime Minister. It is a ‘wing’ of the Prime Minister’s personal office (and hence not answerable to India’s Parliament, nor subject to India’s Right to Information Act).

From his temporary desk at the ISI Karachi HQ on Mohammed Shah Road, Brigadier Mahmood placed a phone call to a fellow one-star general in India’s Directorate of Military Intelligence in New Delhi. The RAW was the agency responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence about Pakistan—India’s Muslim neighbor was considered such a threat that it rated its own Directorate, Number One, within the RAW, the only nation so treated—but relations between ISI and RAW were so poor that Mahmood was counting on his personal relationship with another flag officer to smooth over a situation that could easily turn into a huge political hot potato. The Indian brigadier general was named Virinder Singh.

“I dare not broach this matter through the proper channels, Virinder,” Mahmood said after asking Brigadier Singh how he and his wife and family were doing. “This is an Islamist terror problem involving the Americans. Very sensitive. And very dangerous indeed should it become public.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Singh said. “The Americans are always your worst headache, and often mine. What do you want me to do?”

“Probably through a clerical error, an intermodal cargo container was dropped off at a shipyard near Bharuch, in Gujarat, yesterday. Global-Modal Asia Limited has picked up the container and is transporting it by lorry to Surat, down the coast. We wish to intercept the container and seize the contents.”

“It contains arms, you say? What sort of arms?” Brigadier Singh’s voice had grown a tad more tense.

“Virinder, please believe me when I say we don’t know. The Americans have been deeply concerned of late about chatter among the various Islamic groups about acquiring a nuke.”

“A nuke! Bloody hell! We are concerned too, my friend,” General Singh said urgently. “And we have been listening to the same talk in the networks that you have heard.”

“Then you know how tense this makes everyone, especially the Americans. It is my hope that you and I, as military men, can deal with this
sub rosa
as it were, under the radar, in secrecy. This is not a problem we want to leave to the politicians or the journalists.” Brigadier Mahmood could hear Singh chuckling gently on the other end of the line.

“You have not changed, and I am glad of it, Mahmood. If all your countrymen were as pleasant to deal with as you are, India and Pakistan would be allies instead of at each other’s throats.”

“You will try to work with me on this one?”

“Indeed,” Brigadier Singh said. “What do you propose? I’ll do what I can.”

***

The oldest English-language newspaper in Pakistan, founded in 1941, is called
Dawn
. Its Karachi office is on the same spit of land, the West Wharf, that is home to the Karachi International Container Terminal and Karachi Shipyards. The Karachi headquarters of
Dawn
is also home to Pakistan’s only 24-hour news channel,
Dawn News
. To reach a wider audience than the English-only newspaper,
Dawn News
broadcasts in Urdu, Pakistan’s official language, though it is spoken by less than ten per cent of the population. The
Dawn Group
is among the most competitive of Pakistan’s 1,500 news organizations, especially when it comes to politics, the Army, ISI, and the perfidious behavior of the American government.

While Brigadier Mahmood was making his phone call to Brigadier Singh in New Delhi, the political editor at
Dawn
received a phone call from a regular informant at the Karachi Port Trust, a senior-level administrator who did not appreciate the tongue-lashing he had received earlier in the week from a certain ISI senior officer.

“I can tell you in the strictest confidence,” the port administrator said, “that the bloody spies from the capital have been snooping around the facilities of Global-Modal Asia Limited.”

“That’s hardly news,” the editor responded.

“In search of a terrorist bomb, perhaps a nuclear bomb? I think not.”

“Now, that’s news!”

“And with an American CIA operative in tow, no less.”

“Pakistani ISI is cooperating with CIA?” the editor said, now very focussed. “That would indeed be a story. But I don’t believe it.”

“Listen, I have solid information that they believe a weapon has already crossed the border into India, at Bharuch. Let me tell you what I know...”

***

Less than a mile from the
Dawn
editorial offices on East Wharf, the U.S. Consulate in Karachi occupies a triangular compound of three acres wedged between M. T. Khan Road and the Mai Kolachi Bypass, a stone’s throw from the muddy waters of the harbor. It was here that Kate Langley parked herself when she needed to use secure communication. She was on the phone with CIA’s Chief of Station in New Delhi.

“Mort Feldman asked me to brief you on what’s going down tomorrow in Bharuch,” she said when he came on line.

“This is the intermodal shipping container thing?” CIA’s man in New Delhi had his hands full with recent bombings of jurists at the High Court. He sounded preoccupied and exhausted. Spillover from Pakistan’s plate of problems wasn’t what he needed.

“ISI is working with the Indian Army to interdict the container with local police. We are planning to do this surgically, cleanly, and without attracting any attention.”

“Please tell me you don’t need help from me?”

“We’ve covered our bases,” Kate said. “This is just a head’s up to make sure you are in the loop. Mort doesn’t like surprises.”

“Amen! Neither do I.”

“I’ll keep you posted as soon as I have news,” Kate said.

“Good luck, and God’s speed,” the chief of Station said. “And please don’t do anything that will complicate my life, OK?” He closed the call.