"Takedown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thor Brad)

Two

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

MAY 18

President Jack Rutledge entered the situation room and signaled the men and women around the conference table to take their seats. He was less than five months into his second term and had already been called to this room more times than in the last two years combined.

He had hoped to use his second term to focus on the key domestic policy issues he had campaigned on and which would comprise his legacy. But more than that, the president wanted to leave his successor, Democrat or Republican, a better country than had been left to him. The war on terror, though, had much different plans for Rutledge.

Contrary to what the White House press secretary was spinning to the media, terrorist plots against America and American interests were not on the decline. They were in fact on a very marked upswing, and the United States was running out of fingers and toes with which to plug the dike.

For every attack the United States thwarted, three more popped up in its wake. The operations tempo in the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities was higher than anyone had ever seen. Despite its phenomenal successes, most of which the average citizen was never aware of, all America seemed able to do was tread water. The country was running well beyond capacity and it was only a matter of time before the overtaxed system collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Something needed to be done, and done soon.

That was the thought on the mind of every person in the room as the president finished skimming the contents of the file folder in front of him and turned the meeting over to General Bart Waddell, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” replied Waddell, a tall, dark-haired man in his late forties. As he stood, he pressed a button on a small digital remote, and the plasma monitors at the front of the room, as well as those recessed within the situation-room table, sprang to life with the revolving DIA logo. “The footage I am about to show you was shot this morning. It was developed thanks to two converging pieces of intelligence. The first was a series of satellite surveillance photos ordered up by the Central Intelligence Agency when one of its field officers spotted the subject in North Africa-Morocco, to be exact. The second piece of intelligence was a tip that pinpointed the subject’s base of operations more than six thousand kilometers southeast in Somalia.”

Waddell advanced to the first slide in his PowerPoint presentation and everyone watched as a dusty Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up in front of the weather-beaten façade of a long single-story structure. “What you are looking at is a Muslim religious boys’ school, or madrassa, on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The man getting out of the car on the right is Mohammed bin Mohammed, aka Abu Khabab al-Fari, or as our analysts are fond of calling him, M amp;M. He is known as al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker and head of their weapons of mass destruction committee. Born in Algeria in 1953, he has training in both physics and chemical engineering.”

Waddell then advanced through a series of still images as he continued to narrate. “At al-Qaeda’s Tora Bora base near Jalalabad, Mohammed not only built and managed a facility for the manufacture of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, but he provided hundreds of operatives with training in the use of those weapons. Most of you are familiar with the images that made it into mainstream media showing the scores of dead dogs, cats, donkeys, et cetera scattered outside the complex.”

Everyone in the room was indeed familiar with the photos, but it didn’t make them any easier to have to see again. Around the table, they nodded their heads in grim unison.

“The photos only heightened some of our worst fears about the ghoulish experiments we suspected M amp;M was carrying out with anthrax and other biological and chemical poisons.

“When our teams hit the site in 2001, we found hoards of documents authored by Mohammed. They bore little similarity to the other terrorist manuals recovered at al-Qaeda safe houses throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, which in comparison were extremely crude. Mohammed’s manuals contained very innovative designs for explosive devices and represented a huge leap forward in al-Qaeda’s technological capabilities.

“On September ninth, two days before the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mohammed’s facility was completely abandoned and he was evacuated to an unknown location somewhere in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Despite numerous leads, we had not been able to assemble any verifiable eyes-on intelligence for him. Until this morning.”

“Any idea what he was doing at the madrassa?” asked Secretary of State Jennifer Staley.

Waddell turned to James Vaile, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to see if he wanted to field the question.

DCI Vaile looked at Staley and said, “There have been reports that some elements of al-Qaeda are taking advantage of the absence of a strong centralized government in Somalia to reestablish themselves and open up training camps.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alan Driehaus shook his head and said, “I suppose the fact that we wouldn’t touch Mogadishu or any of that area with a ten-foot pole only adds to its appeal for them.”

“How do you know we wouldn’t touch it?” asked General Hank Currutt, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A patriot who had bled for his country on more than one battlefield, Currutt had never been a big fan of Driehaus’s. He felt the secretary’s position called for a warrior familiar with combat rather than a career attorney familiar with nothing more than the inside of a courtroom.

For his part, Driehaus resented Currutt’s constant implications that he wasn’t up to the task and that serving his country for more than two decades in the Department of Justice was somehow less noble than having served it in the armed forces. “Considering the whole Black Hawk Down incident and the fact that our resources are stretched too thin as it is,” replied Driehaus, “I just assumed we wouldn’t be too hot to jump into another conflict over there. I think we need to start being very sensitive to the perception that we’re empire building.”

“Empire building?” replied Currutt. “Is that what you think this is?”

“I said that’s the perception, but you’d have to be blind not to see where it comes from.”

“Well, let me tell you something. We’ve sent a lot of brave young men and women to fight for freedom outside of our borders and the only land we’ve ever asked for in return is enough to bury those who didn’t come home.”

The room was completely silent.

Normally, the president embraced healthy differences of opinion among his cabinet members and advisors, but he knew something that Secretary Driehaus didn’t. Hank Currutt was at the “ Battle of the Black Sea,” as that infamous eighteen-hour firefight in the heart of Mogadishu ’s Bakara Market was known. Eighteen servicemen had been killed and more than seventy wounded.

There were too many pressing issues vying for their attention to allow the animosity between Driehaus and Currutt to become the focus of this meeting. They needed to concentrate on the matter in front of them, and Rutledge was enough of a statesman to know that allowing Currutt to jump across the table and rip Driehaus’s throat out was anything but productive.

The president said, “As far as I’m concerned, all options are on the table at this point. Mohammed is one of the most dangerous threats to this country and I have to be honest, up to this point I’d been harboring a secret hope that with all the bombs we dropped on Tora Bora, we had pulverized whatever rock he was hiding under and that’s why we hadn’t heard anything from him. But now we know differently and I want to discuss what we’re going to do about it. General Waddell, it was your folks that gathered the intel. What’s your read on this?”

“Well, Mr. President, we know from the documents we’ve recovered and from our interviews with detainees both at Gitmo and in Afghanistan that Mohammed had been trying to assemble very sophisticated delivery devices for multiple terror attacks inside the United States. We’ve got eyes on him right now and I think we need to strike while the iron is hot. We’re never going to get a chance like this again. I say we take him out.”

“Director Vaile?” inquired the president as he turned to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Would you concur?”

“Normally, I would, but we’ve got a problem in this case.”

“What kind of problem?” asked Waddell.

“We know that despite our successes al-Qaeda is reconstituting itself. They have a myriad of attacks at different stages of development here in the United States and abroad, some of which we’re on to and many of which we’re still trying to smoke out.

“As you are aware, Mr. President, one of the most troubling pieces of intelligence we’ve uncovered recently is that they’re very close to completing a transaction that would allow them to launch an unprecedented nuclear attack on the U.S. Based upon several converging streams of intelligence, including the loss of our field operative and the satellite imagery we pulled from Marrakech, we have a very high degree of certainty the transaction was masterminded and is being controlled by Mohammed bin Mohammed. The CIA’s position is that it’s vital to national security that he be taken alive for interrogation purposes.”

“You mean torture by some friendly government,” replied Secretary Driehaus. “The ultimate in American outsourcing.”

Vaile fixed the head of the DHS with a very unfriendly stare.

“Where would we send this one? The ex-Soviet facilities in Eastern Europe are pretty much out of the question, especially now that the press has been all over them. Most of the Western Europeans won’t allow us to use their international airports as transition points anymore. So, I suppose that leaves us with our old fallbacks. Egypt? Jordan?”

“Which side are you on, Alan?” asked Vaile.

“I side with the rule of law,” replied Driehaus.

Everyone in the room knew the secretary was not a fan of the administration’s extraordinary rendition policy. It was a strategy that allowed prisoners to be handed over to foreign governments who conducted torture so that the United States could sidestep its own laws strictly forbidding it.

Keeping his eyes locked on Driehaus, the DCI said, “Regardless of where Mohammed might be interrogated, I think the president’s policies have served our country, and in particular your department, exceedingly well.”

“With all due respect to the president, I think you’re wrong,” said the DHS secretary. “We’re supposed to be a nation that holds the rule of law above all else. We use it to justify every single thing we do, including the invasion of other sovereign nations. If we don’t truly place that principle above all else then we can’t be any better than the terrorists we’re fighting against.”

“That’s it!” bellowed General Hank Currutt as he rose from his chair and stabbed his thick finger at Driehaus. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this subversive garbage.”

“Subversive?” replied Driehaus. “That’s a mighty convenient way to label opinions that don’t agree with yours.”

“Listen, you smug SOB, if you don’t like the way things are being done here, then resign your post, pick up a picket sign, and stand on the other side of the fence with the rest of the whackos out on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Once again, things were quickly spinning in the wrong direction. “Let’s take our seats and all calm down,” said the president. When Currutt didn’t comply, the president ordered, “General, I said sit down.”

Once the man had retaken his seat, the president looked at Driehaus and said, “You’ve got a sharp mind, Alan, especially when it comes to homeland security issues and that’s why-”

“Mr. President,” interjected Driehaus, “our enemies use our extraordinary rendition policy as prime recruiting propaganda. In fact, with all the attention the media has been devoting to it, they don’t need to recruit at all. Willing bodies are lined up out their doors and down the block. This policy makes us look like hypocrites.”

“No it doesn’t,” stressed Rutledge, who had been getting progressively more frustrated with his appointee’s refusal to be a team player. “The policy makes us look tough. What’s more, it gets results. Civilized rules of engagement and jurisprudence mean nothing to a vicious enemy willing to do anything to succeed. If we want to win, we have to adopt the same strategy-success at any cost. I’m sorry, Alan, but if a nation refuses to bend, then that nation is almost certainly doomed to break. In this case we have to suspend the rule of law in part, in order to save it.”

That one remark tore at the very few remnants of respect Driehaus had left for the president. “We know Mohammed exchanged information with the Palestinian and Hezbollah bombmakers who helped Richard Reid design the shoe bomb he carried on the Paris-to-Boston flight in 2001. Let’s indict him under that. If we put him on trial here, a fair trial, it will go a long way to repairing our image abroad. And it’ll send the message that we’re tough.”

“Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in 1993,” interjected the attorney general, Laura Finley. “We found him, tried him, and put him in SuperMax out in Colorado, but where’d that get us? His uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, came back with al-Qaeda and hit the Trade Center again in 2001. Yousef got a fair trial and then he got life in prison. That’s pretty tough, if you ask me, but it didn’t stop anything. Alan, we’ve worked together and you know I have a lot of respect for you, but the president’s right. We can’t bring knives to gunfights anymore.”

Driehaus was about to respond, when the secretary of state, Jennifer Staley, piped up and said, “As someone who deals with America’s image abroad on an around-the-clock basis, I want to put my two cents in here. Have the press leaks about our interrogations of detainees abroad hurt our image overseas? Yes, they definitely have. But the bottom line is that right or wrong, the United States is safer because of what we’re doing.”

“So we shouldn’t be concerned with what happens to these people once they’ve been handed over to another government?”

“When we render a suspect, that suspect is often being rendered to his or her country of origin or a country where that individual already has outstanding warrants. Despite how the press warps our involvement, we actually have very little control over what happens from that point forward.”

“So there’s a slice of absolution in it for us-a washing of the hands, as it were,” replied the DHS secretary.

Staley was much too intelligent to walk into that one. Instead she offered, “What I’ll say is that even our beloved President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. I think the intelligence we’ve gathered through extraordinary rendition speaks for itself.”

Driehaus looked around the table. “So I’m the only one? Nobody else has any concern about adding yet another name to the secret prisoner rolls of this policy?”

“Actually,” said a voice from the other end of the table, “I do.”

Stunned, all heads in the room turned to stare at the FBI director, Martin Sorce. Once he was sure he had everyone’s attention, the director continued, “This will be one of the highest-ranking al-Qaeda members we’ve ever taken down. But because of the wide coverage of extraordinary rendition, some of the more cooperative governments we’ve been working with have said they won’t take any more of our prisoners. We’ve also had a couple of so-called escapes, which we know al-Qaeda facilitated through bribes, payoffs, or intimidation of some of the people involved with these same governments.

“So, this isn’t as easy as throwing a dart at a map and asking the locals to warm up the coffee and jumper cables because we’ve got a new stepchild. For a prisoner this big and this dangerous, security has to be our number one issue. I want to know that whomever we park this cupcake with, they’re not going to lose him.”

“That’s a good point,” said the DCI. “Mohammed bin Mohammed’s capture will create a lot of special problems, and security will be the biggest. Al-Qaeda would do anything to get this guy back. If we let the Egyptians or Jordanians host him, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to hang on to him. Look at what happened to the USS Cole planners in Yemen. On the flip side, if we transport him to Gitmo, our hands are going to be tied in terms of how hard we can press him for details, and we are going to need that WMD transaction intelligence as soon as possible.”

“So where’s that leave us?” asked Attorney General Finley.

“Between a rock and a public relations hard place,” said the secretary of state. “While we can’t change the bad press we’ve already received, Secretary Driehaus does have a valid point. Whatever we do going forward, we’d better not screw it up.”