Countdown to Midnight, page 5
Flynn considered that. Looked at one way, the older man’s theory was plausible. But, at the same time, something about it just didn’t ring true to him. Finally, he shook his head. “That oil tanker the Iranians are fixing up is damned big all right,” he said. “But that’s exactly the problem I see with using her simply to run guns.”
“The Gulf Venture would be too conspicuous, you mean?” Fox suggested quietly.
Flynn nodded. “Yep.” Before reporting to Avalon House, he’d done some quick internet research. “Between its own merchant marine and ships operating under false flags, Iran’s got dozens, maybe hundreds, of other cargo vessels and tramp freighters at its disposal. Sure, they’re all significantly smaller, but by the same token, they’re also a hell of a lot less likely to draw attention than would an eight-hundred-foot-long tanker. Maybe the Gulf Venture could slip past the various navies still enforcing some sanctions on Iran, but why take the risk? It’s a bad option.”
“Because it would involve putting too many eggs into just one basket,” Fox realized.
“Bingo,” Flynn agreed. “I can’t see the Iranians being dumb enough to risk shipping so much valuable contraband in a single hull. Smuggling ops work best using multiple ships. Sure, our Navy guys or the Israelis can stop and board a dhow here and a tramp freighter there, but there’s no way they can possibly catch them all. Trusting to luck to sneak a single huge oil tanker through a blockade without being intercepted? That’s amateur hour stuff . . . and those murderous sons of bitches in Tehran don’t strike me as amateurs.”
“Our lives would be much easier if they were,” Fox said dryly. “Anything else?”
Flynn nodded again. “Yeah. For example, some of the changes they’re making to the Gulf Venture don’t square at all with the idea of using her for smuggling runs. Concealed centerline compartments and extra hydraulic cranes? I get why you’d need those on a ship converted to carry contraband. But then why retrofit those special stabilizer fins and extra high-speed oil pumps Khavari’s naval architect friend made such a big deal out of?”
The older man looked closely at him. “Why indeed?”
“I don’t have a doggone clue,” Flynn told him wryly. “I was an English major in college, remember? The closest I ever came to taking an engineering class was first-year calculus. That’s sort of like comparing flying a kite to launching a Saturn V rocket to the moon.”
“Point taken, Nick,” Fox said with the faint hint of a smile of his own. “I’ll pass the problem on to those with more in-depth knowledge of ship design and construction. Though very discreetly, of course.”
“Which raises another point,” Flynn continued. “Why put all these extreme security measures in place around the Bandar Abbas shipyard in the first place? Units of special Quds Force commandos? Locking down the whole workforce? Even bringing in armed foreigners as additional guards? For what? Just to hide the fact that Iran wants to smuggle even more weapons to bad guys around the globe? Hell, that’s not exactly a secret to anyone who reads the news. And it sure doesn’t explain why someone sent in a whole assassination squad just to shut Khavari’s mouth.” He frowned. “No, whatever these guys are planning, it’s got to be something much bigger and nastier.”
“No doubt,” Fox said. He tapped at his chin reflectively. “You’re confident the men you spotted watching the Kitzbühel train station were Russians?”
“Pretty sure, yes. And while the biker Laura shot spoke reasonably fluent German, I still picked up a faint Russian accent.”
Fox’s mouth tightened. “That certainly fits. The tactics you’ve described match those used by Spetsnaz assassination squads in the past.”
“You think the Kremlin ordered the hit on Khavari?” Flynn asked curiously. “Not the mullahs in Tehran?”
Fox sighed. “It’s certainly a disquieting possibility we need to consider. The obvious alternative is that the killers are somehow connected to those so-called foreign mercenaries working inside Iran.” His frown deepened. “All of which suggests that either the Russian government is working hand-in-glove with Tehran on this mysterious oil tanker project . . . or that Iran’s leaders see whatever they’re planning as so important that they’re even willing to rely on outsiders to handle crucial elements.” He pinched his nose, looking suddenly tired. “One thing’s absolutely clear: learning more about their real intentions is now our highest-priority task.”
“That may mean putting an agent, or even a small team of agents, on the ground inside Iran,” Flynn said carefully. He never slept very well on planes, so he’d spent a number of hours over the darkened Atlantic last night exploring different ways to bypass the information roadblock created by Khavari’s murder.
Fox looked skeptical. “Just getting into Iran safely is a highly risky endeavor. The whole country is the very definition of a hostile environment. But even assuming that proves possible, what are our people supposed to do next? Sneak inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard and take a closer look at the Gulf Venture?”
Flynn grinned at him. “Oh, hell, no. I may be loco, but I’m not a complete lunatic. Based on what Khavari told me, it would take an armored battalion with full-on air support to penetrate the security cordon around that tanker. Which doesn’t really seem like the subtle approach Four ordinarily prefers.”
“To put it mildly,” Fox said, matching his ironic tone. “And, of course, that’s setting aside the minor problem of finding a force of spare tanks and fighter planes just lying around for us to borrow.” He turned serious. “So what do you have in mind?”
“Right now, the only real loose thread we have left to pull on is that friend of Khavari’s, Daneshvar—the guy who first clued him into all the weird shit going down at that shipyard,” Flynn explained. “If we can make contact with him directly, we might pick up some of the answers we need.”
Fox frowned. “There are quite a number of ‘if’s lurking there, Nick.”
“Yes, sir, I realize that,” Flynn agreed evenly. “I just don’t see any other way forward right now.”
Slowly, the older man nodded. “Very well, start working up a proposed infiltration plan and any necessary cover stories. But I’ll need to consult closely with my colleagues at the other stations before authorizing this mission.”
Flynn wasn’t surprised by his superior’s reluctance to act without approval from the other members of Four’s upper echelon. From its very beginnings in the earliest days of the developing Cold War, the Quartet Directorate had used a collegial approach to leadership. The reality that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely was abundantly clear to those who’d already risked their lives fighting Nazi Germany—only to see the growing threat posed by the Soviet Union in World War II’s chaotic aftermath.
Four’s first recruits were all veterans of the American OSS, Britain’s SOE (the Special Operations Executive), and the Resistance movements of France, Norway, Poland, and several other Allied countries. Deeply troubled and even angered by what they viewed as the growing politicization, penetration by Soviet moles, and increasing risk aversion of the West’s official government intelligence agencies, these men and women banded together to create an organization that could act swiftly, secretly, and decisively against serious threats to the free world. Aware, however, of the inherent dangers involved in creating a private intelligence group expressly intended to operate outside strictly lawful channels, Four followed one inflexible rule: The Quartet Directorate never involved itself in the domestic politics of any friendly nation. As a safeguard, if time allowed, large-scale or unusually dangerous operations required explicit approval from the separate national stations scattered around the world.
“And in the meantime,” Fox went on, “I’ll pass the key elements of what we’ve learned to a couple of my contacts in the CIA.”
Like most of Four’s senior executives, the older man maintained discreet, arms-length relationships with people in the regular military and intelligence services—though only after they’d been meticulously vetted. And he was always careful to conceal the true nature of the Quartet Directorate’s structure, aims, and capabilities from these contacts.
“Do you think that’ll do any good?” Flynn asked skeptically. His own bad experiences with some of the CIA’s “best and brightest” had soured him on both its basic competence and its real interest in anything except its own narrow parochial concerns.
“Probably not,” Fox conceded. “I don’t have all that much faith in Langley’s ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.” He shrugged. “But who knows? There could always be a first time.”
Five
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
The Next Day
The conference room on the top floor was crowded. A dozen people, all of them high-ranking executives in the Central Intelligence Agency, sat around a large rectangular table. Their coffee cups, tablet computers, and notepads littered the table’s surface. More men and women, senior staffers for those around the table, occupied the chairs lining three sides of the dark-paneled room. The fourth wall held a large digital screen currently showing the CIA’s seal, an eagle above a shield embossed with a compass rose.
A heavyset, florid-faced man sat alone at the head of the table. Charles Horne was the recently appointed DCI, the director of Central Intelligence. His thick lips pursed as he jotted down a quick a note to himself. Finally, with a satisfied nod, he looked back up. “Very good. That last report from Science and Technology takes care of all of our priority agenda items.” He ran his heavy-lidded gaze around the table. “Now, does anyone have anything else we should discuss this morning?”
Miranda Reynolds, head of the CIA’s highly secret Directorate of Operations, hid a grimace. In the weeks since he’d taken over the reins at Langley, Horne had definitely put his own personal stamp on the way things ran. Unlike many of his predecessors, he’d spent most of his government service in the State Department—where talk was more valued than action—and it showed.
Focused one-on-one meetings between the director and his senior subordinates were now rare, replaced instead by seeming endless daily conferences like this one. Not only did these talkathons waste time, something that was always in short supply for those at the top of the CIA’s food chain like her, they were also an added security risk. Bringing so many people into the loop on matters they had absolutely no need to know anything about was just asking for trouble. Unauthorized leaks to the press and to Congress were already a serious problem for the agency. In Reynolds’s cynical view, all these gabfests really accomplished was to expand the list of suspects for any internal security investigation.
She fought the temptation to check her watch. With luck, her colleagues would keep their mouths shut so they could go ahead and adjourn. Important messages from CIA stations around the world were piling up in her email inbox. It wasn’t as though America’s adversaries took a timeout while Horne made his senior people and their top aides suffer through these interminable, unproductive meetings.
Reynolds snarled inwardly when she saw Philip Demopoulos lean forward to catch the DCI’s attention. Demopoulos, a wiry man with wavy gray hair and a stylish goatee, was her counterpart in charge of the Directorate of Analysis. In general, his analysts were supposed to evaluate the raw data gathered by her officers and agents—together with snippets of intelligence accumulated from other sources—and produce coherent, accurate intelligence reports on trouble spots around the world. Sometimes it worked the other way round, when his analysts needed her people to confirm wild rumors or stories they’d picked up elsewhere. All too often, those were nothing but dead ends, a waste of precious manhours and scarce resources.
“It looks as though the Iranians are working on a very unusual project in one of their shipyards near Bandar Abbas,” Demopoulos said. “At least that’s what we’re hearing through previously reliable sources.”
Reynolds frowned. That wasn’t anything her people had dug up, which meant this was another case where the Analysis Directorate was freelancing. Wonderful. She listened intently while he rattled off an impressive-sounding recitation of Tehran’s plans to heavily modify one of their AFRAMAX-sized oil tankers for some unknown purpose.
To cap off his short presentation, Demopoulos pulled up a satellite photo of the shipyard in question. “This image was taken earlier today,” he explained. “During a pass by one of our KH-11 recon birds.” He highlighted the enormous ship occupying the yard’s large drydock. An odd, tentlike structure obscured all but the forward sections of its bow. “As you can see, this image confirms part of what we were told by our sources. The Iranians are definitely taking extraordinary precautions to keep us from seeing the kind of work they’re doing on this tanker.”
The DCI stared at the satellite image in silence for several moments. Then he turned back to Demopoulos. “Does this story of yours come from the Israelis, Phil?” he asked. His tone was skeptical.
“No, sir,” the analysis chief said. “At least not directly. This information was relayed to us through a small private security firm with corporate contacts in the Middle East.”
“Relayed from who, exactly?” Horne asked sharply.
“We’re not quite sure,” Demopoulos admitted. “But our best guess is that what we’re hearing probably originated with one or more of the various Iranian dissident groups. There’s also a possible connection to that Iranian official found murdered in Austria a couple of days ago. He worked for their state shipping company.”
Horne’s lips thinned in irritation. “The man the Iranians claim was assassinated by the Mossad, you mean?”
“Jerusalem has unequivocally denied any involvement in his death,” Demopoulos said carefully.
Horne snorted. A scowl settled on his jowly face. He looked down the table at Reynolds. “Can you confirm any of this material, Miranda?”
She saw the way the wind was blowing. Horne might be a career diplomat by training, but he was a political animal by inclination. He’d climbed the ladder steadily over the years by attaching himself to rising stars on the political side of the State Department—appointees who moved up in successive administrations to more and more powerful positions. Whenever these men or women looked around for a trustworthy subordinate, they always found Charles Horne waiting, eager and willing to do their bidding and happy to toe the chosen party line.
At this moment, the president and his advisers were orchestrating a major diplomatic push to lure Iran “back into the community of nations.” They faulted previous administrations for treating the Islamic Republic as a pariah state. Tehran’s isolated rulers, they argued, would respond more positively to carrots—trade deals, relaxed sanctions, and renewed arms limitation negotiations—than to insults and threats. So the last thing the new DCI wanted to do now was go to the White House with worrying new intelligence about Iran’s possible plans and intentions.
Miranda Reynolds thought very quickly. Two recent blown covert operations in a row—one in Libya, the other in Alaska—had painted a target on her back. So far, she’d kept control of the Operations Directorate by pulling political strings herself . . . and by not so subtly reminding those above her that she was one of the few women in the CIA’s top echelon. For the moment, no one wanted to endure the media frenzy that could result from firing one of Langley’s pioneers for women’s equality. But making an enemy of Horne now by siding with Phil Demopoulos might easily tip the balance against her.
No, she decided, she had nothing to gain here. Especially since the reports passed to the Analysis Directorate seemed so vague and open to different interpretations. Certainly, nothing about them suggested any level of threat to the United States or its interests that might make this situation a hill worth dying on.
“Confirm these fragmentary reports? No, sir. I can’t,” Reynolds said firmly, ignoring the surprised look on Demopoulos’s face. “None of our own sources inside the Iranian government have reported anything about this mysterious oil tanker project. Not a peep.”
Left carefully unstated was the inconvenient and rather embarrassing fact that the CIA only had a few agents inside Iran. Or that none of them were based anywhere near Bandar Abbas. Left equally unstated were her growing suspicions that a significant number of the Iranian nationals her officers had recruited as sources were actually double agents for Iran’s own Ministry of Intelligence.
“I see.” Horne looked satisfied. He turned back to Demopoulos. “I don’t think this tanker business is worth pursuing further, Phil.” He shrugged. “More likely than not, it’s just a wild rumor planted by Israeli or Arab hardliners. Or by Iranian no-hopers feverishly imagining we can be tricked into supporting some lunatic effort to overthrow the government in Tehran.”
“But—”
The DCI rode roughshod over Demopoulos’s half-hearted attempt to object. “Whatever sort of changes the Iranians are actually making to this ship, one thing’s sure: it can’t stay hidden forever. And if this converted tanker really does pose a genuine threat to our national security, I’m quite confident that we can stop it cold when the time comes.” He shook his head. “I won’t condone jumping at shadows on my watch. And there’s certainly no justification here to jeopardize one of the president’s top foreign policy initiatives by going off half-cocked.” He stared hard at Demopoulos. “Is that understood?”
