Command and control, p.6
Command and Control, page 6
The driver spun the wheel, putting the patrol boat broadside to the Black. The Iranian boat appeared tiny next to the gray hull of the Black. Pips of white fire spewed out of the muzzle of the grenade launcher, lancing up at the bigger ship.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the bridge windows of the Black blew out in a massive explosion.
Blast after blast erupted on the superstructure of the Black as the grenades exploded one after another. A narration on the video reported the Iranian weapon was a Nasir 40mm automatic grenade launcher. The belt-fed device had managed to get off almost thirty shots before it sped away. The shots were a deadly mix of conventional grenades and white phosphorus rounds.
Don felt his rib cage contract in sympathy. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it must have been like on the bridge of the Black. With the ship at general quarters, there would have been at least a dozen crewmembers up there when the first grenade detonated.
Don cleared his throat. He’d seen enough. What had happened to the Black was tragic, but it was also a fluke, a lucky shot by a lone gunman. The Iranian Navy had picked a fight with the wrong opponent, and now they were paying the price. Case closed. It was not the job of Emerging Threats Group to investigate it.
“Dre—” Don began.
“There’s more,” Dre interrupted. Her dark eyes shone with frenetic energy. “Five minutes, boss. Then I’ll shut up, I promise.”
Reluctantly, Don nodded.
“During the attack on the Black,” Dre began, “we did not have any recon satellites over the region, but I was able to find one partial image.” Dre pointed at the screen. “This is from a low-angle bird at the time of the attack. It was discarded by the investigation because it has incomplete coverage and they have excellent orthogonal shots starting about thirty minutes after the attack.”
“Dre,” Don said. “The investigative team is going to assess all the data that they have—”
“The Black moved,” Dre said with an edge in her voice. “After the attack, I mean. She still had power. She escorted the merchant ship away from the scene of the attack.”
Don paused, wondering where she was going with this.
“No one thought anything of it,” Dre said, “because the next satellite pass fixed her location precisely.”
Don did not like the look in her eyes. Wild, unsettled. Worried.
“Continue,” he said.
Dre took a deep breath. “When you apply geometrical rectification to this crappy oblique-angle satellite pass from the time of the attack, it shows that the Black was not in international waters.”
Don listened with growing concern as she ran through her calculations using a process called space oblique Mercator projection theory to turn a low-angle image into a top-down picture.
“It’s a crappy image,” Dre said. “Very low angle and partially obscured by the mountain ranges along the coast, but there’s enough there to catch the stern of the Black and the Iranian destroyer in this one frame. Maybe they just missed it when they did a data sweep. Or maybe I was just looking harder for clues.”
Dre pointed at the screen. Using the new location data, the USS Delbert D. Black and the merchant vessel were both at least a thousand meters outside of the shipping lane.
Don felt sick to his stomach. If Dre was right, then the United States had gone to war on false pretenses.
On the adjacent TV screen, yet another Navy jet was rocketing off the USS Abraham Lincoln, en route to drop more bombs on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“How certain are you of your calculations?” Don thought his voice sounded loud in the quiet room.
Dre’s face clouded. “I did the math myself, but I have a call in to a friend over at…” Her voice trailed off. “No, Don, I’m right. I know it.”
Don stared at the screen. The lines delineating the boundaries of the shipping lane were bright yellow. On the scale of the screen, the outline of the US Navy destroyer was an inch away from that magic yellow border.
“Don’t call anyone or do anything else,” Don said. “This information does not leave this room. Do you understand?”
8
Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India
When the battered taxi Roger Tan was riding in stopped at an intersection, a horde of beggar children swarmed the vehicle, hands out, their voices a chorus of wails and pleas.
Despite the thirty-three-degree Celsius heat and the barely functioning air-conditioning unit in the car, Roger rolled up his window. The car smelled of baked dust and old curry. A kid pressed both hands flat on Roger’s window and peered inside.
Roger looked away. He touched the missing chunk of his right earlobe, then quickly dropped his hand back into his lap.
He hated India. The noise, the chaos, the unrelenting poverty…It was all too much. Places like this dredged up memories that he’d rather leave buried.
The driver laid on the horn and inched the car forward to clear away the tide of small brown bodies around them. He caught Roger’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“You here for the beaches, sir?” he said in lilting English. “I know the best beaches. Lots of pretty women.”
“No,” Roger said. “Just take me to the port.”
A shrug. “As you wish. The port.”
The Minister had selected Visakhapatnam carefully. The port, on the eastern coast of India, was large enough for the North Korean freighter to go unnoticed among the other shipping traffic but small enough to ensure the security was less than state-of-the-art. The city was also a tourist destination, which meant a large transient population.
The Minister’s choice did not disappoint. Security consisted of an open gate and a uniformed guard dozing in a booth. The taxi driver motored past without waking the guard and parked outside the offices of Garduba Trading Company.
“Wait here,” Roger said to the driver.
The interior of the Garduba Trading Company was only slightly cooler than outside. A ceiling fan moved the thick air, stirring up a musty smell. Roger pulled his sweaty shirt away from the small of his back.
The man behind the desk did not look up when Roger entered, keeping his gaze fixed on his computer screen. He was gray-haired and pear-shaped, seated behind a desk heaped with stacks of paper. Bulky headphones were clamped over his ears. The whiteboard hanging on the wall behind him should have been a shipping schedule, but a quick glance showed the information to be years out of date.
Roger advanced to the desk and leaned over. The man was streaming a movie. The woman on the screen was dressed like an Indian princess with a jewel fixed to her forehead, her dark hair flowing over her shoulders. Her sequined red dress showed a generous amount of cleavage.
“Excuse me,” Roger said.
The man grimaced and touched his keyboard to stop the movie. He slid one side of the headphones away from his ear.
“What do you want?” His voice was drowsy.
“Has the Hoe Ryong docked yet?” Roger asked.
The man sighed and minimized the movie on his screen. He tapped at the keyboard. “North Korean?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Roger replied.
The man shook his head and cursed. “Idiots,” he muttered.
“Problem?” Roger said.
“They dock at eight o’clock,” the man said, “but Customs goes home at five. They’ll sit there until morning.”
“I see,” Roger said. “Will I be able to contact them tonight? Maybe a night security guard can get them a message for me? I can pay, of course.”
The man snorted. “Security? Here? They just shut the gate and go home.” He restarted his movie, settled the headphones back on his ears, and slumped in his chair. “Come back in the morning.”
The Indian princess had tears in her eyes, her henna-tattooed hand clutched at her heaving breast.
Roger’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. A name and address.
“You’ve been very helpful,” Roger said.
The Percolator Coffee House on Dr. NTR Beach Road was in the trendy part of Vizag, as the city of Visakhapatnam was known locally. The modern interior was blond wood, black stone, and gleaming chrome. The clientele was split between mid-twenties with laptops and groups of two or three young women, gossiping and laughing. Everyone was young and beautiful and smiling with brilliant white teeth, uncaring of the fact that hungry children begged on a filthy street a mere two blocks away.
The coffee house was an island of sterile modernity in a chaotic city. According to the text message, it was also owned by an operative in the employ of the Minister. Here, Roger could download a secure message from his mentor.
Roger smiled at the pretty young barista as he ordered a hot tea.
“Is Krish available?” he asked her.
“Of course, sir,” she said. “I’ll get him for you.”
He found a corner booth and opened his laptop. A few moments later, a man in his mid-thirties, dressed business casual in khakis and a blue polo shirt, delivered Roger’s tea.
“I am Krish,” the man said. “How may I help you, sir?”
“I’m here to study the migration of the snow cranes,” Roger responded.
The man paused, glanced around the room, then offered the correct coded response.
Bonafides established, Roger turned his laptop toward the man. “The Wi-Fi password, please.”
The man logged Roger in to the secure router and left. It took a full minute for Roger’s computer to navigate the security protocols and display the latest communique from the Minister.
He scanned the message and felt his pulse quicken. His next assignment would not require a cover identity.
Ian Thomas was taking a work trip to Panama.
To Roger’s eye, the Hoe Ryong looked like it had more rust than metal left in her hull. At barely a hundred meters in length, she was small compared to most of the ships he’d seen along the pier that afternoon.
Roger approached the man standing watch on the ship’s brow. His dirty face could have belonged to someone eighteen or thirty-eight years old. He was thin and dressed in ragged dungarees and a stained T-shirt. He wore battered sandals, and the thick, curving toenails looked like claws in the dim light. He eyed Roger with a narrowed gaze.
“Get captain,” Roger said in his rudimentary Korean.
The man pointed at the pier as an indication for Roger to stay put.
The night air was hot and heavy with the smell of rotting fish and water fouled with sewage. There was no breeze. Besides the Hoe Ryong, there was only one other ship on the pier, and it looked deserted.
The silhouette of a man made his way down the brow to the pier. The captain of the Hoe Ryong was dressed similarly to the sailor, but his T-shirt was stretched tight across a generous belly and he wore red suspenders to hold up his trousers. Roger could smell the alcohol on his breath, and the man swayed slightly when he came to a stop before Roger.
“My cargo is ready to offload?” Roger asked.
“You have my money?” the captain replied.
“You’ve been paid already,” Roger said.
“That was before I knew I was transporting weapons,” the captain said. His grin loomed in the dark. “I’m not a soldier, but I can recognize an AK-47, an RPG, and C-4 explosives when I see them.”
Roger pulled his mobile out of his pocket and opened the WhatsApp account set up by the Minister. “I’ll bring the trucks around,” he replied.
The captain, thinking Roger was toying with him, stepped closer. The sour smell of rice wine on his breath filled the air between them.
“I need to be paid before any of the cargo is moved off my ship,” the captain said.
Without dropping his gaze, Roger reached into his hip pocket and drew out a fat envelope. He split a stack of US dollars with his finger and handed half to the captain. The man’s eyes widened with greed. Roger let his fingertip riffle the remaining bills.
“Half now,” Roger said. “Half when the job is done.”
The captain snatched the bills away and turned on his heel. He shouted in Korean, and the deck sprang to life. Two men unlimbered a deck-mounted hoist as two more threw open a deck hatch.
At the end of the pier, headlights turned the corner, stabbing the darkness. The lights were higher off the ground than a passenger car, indicating they belonged to a heavy truck. Four more trucks followed.
The first vehicle pulled to a stop next to the Hoe Ryong. Like most of the trucks in India, it was painted in bright colors with elaborate tasseled hangings inside the cab. As was typical, the trucks had no side mirrors. Roger noted the figurines of Hindu deities normally found on the dashboards of these types of vehicles were missing. These drivers were Muslim.
The cab door of the lead vehicle opened, and a man swung down to the ground. He was huge, nearly two meters tall, with broad shoulders and a thick neck corded with muscle. His unruly dark hair hung to his shoulders, and he wore a thick beard.
Roger studied the Al-Badr leader as he approached. The man walked with a swagger that to Roger suggested the self-righteousness so often found in these kinds of militant groups. When they clothed their violence in the trappings of faith for long enough, they started to believe their own preachings. In their minds, they became gods.
He was perfect; the Minister had chosen well. With that religious confidence came a sense of invincibility. Properly armed, a man like this could cause much chaos in the world, which is exactly what Roger assumed the Minister had in mind.
The Al-Badr was an Islamic militant group operating in the Jammu and Kashmir region bordering India, Pakistan, and China. Originally funded by the Pakistani ISI, Al-Badr had gone independent in recent years and become a major contributor to friction with India. Now, that friction was about to burst into flames. Armed with Roger’s weapons, Al-Badr had pledged to take a terror campaign into the heart of India.
“The money is ready,” the militant leader said. “All I need is your account number.”
Roger sent him the numbered bank account information via WhatsApp. Although it went against his instincts, the Minister had been very clear that Roger was to use the phone and the social media account to conduct his business with these terrorists.
Roger trusted the Minister. If he wished to leave a digital trail of this transaction, he surely had a reason.
The offloading went swiftly. The Korean captain, drunk on both soju and Roger’s cash, supervised his men in removing crates from the hold and lowering them into the waiting trucks. The crates contained enough firepower to start a small war.
Or even a big war, Roger mused.
When the last truck was being loaded, Roger led the militant leader to the deck of the Hoe Ryong. The captain watched them board, his dark eyes following Roger’s every move, a greedy leer on his lips. He checked off something on his clipboard with an exaggerated gesture.
“Fifty crates of machine parts delivered, sir,” he said to Roger, handing him the clipboard. “Please sign here.”
“Where is your first mate?” Roger asked.
The captain whistled at the man operating the winch. The mate was younger than the captain by about a decade and wore a clean T-shirt tucked into his dungarees.
“How long have you sailed with the captain?” Roger asked in his basic Korean.
“Seven years,” the mate replied in the same language.
“Congratulations,” Roger said.
Roger took the pencil tucked into the clipboard and stabbed the captain in the neck. The man made a wet retching sound, and his eyes snapped open wide. Blood spurted out of his neck and ran down his chest, staining his dirty T-shirt. He reached for Roger, who stepped out of his path. The captain dropped to his knees and toppled over.
All movement on the deck of the Hoe Ryong and on the dock froze. In the stillness, Roger heard the gentle slap of water on the hull of the ship, the rumbling murmur of idling diesel engines from the trucks.
Roger inspected his clothes for any blood spatter and found none. He handed the clipboard to the first mate.
“You are the captain now. Put his body in the freezer and dump him when you get out to sea. The cash in his pocket is yours.”
9
Emerging Threats Group
Tysons Corner, Virginia
On the flat-screen TV mounted to the wall opposite his desk, Don watched the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stride up to the lectern to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. His carefully groomed hair was gelled in place, and round, black-rimmed glasses were pressed firmly against his fleshy cheekbones. His tunic fitted slickly over his tubular body, and he looked like he was in excellent health, defying news reports to the contrary.
For Don, the unprecedented event was a strange juxtaposition of peace amid an otherwise conflict-ridden world.
Until a few weeks ago, the news had been wall-to-wall coverage of the US airstrikes on Iran—even when there was nothing to report. Then a sudden, violent uprising in Kashmir managed to knock that story off the front page.
Now, in another abrupt twist, North Korea was taking center stage with a completely unexpected peace proposal. The offer delighted the United Nations and worried the United States. The American team wondered what was behind the sudden change of heart.
Don felt much older than his almost fifty years. Was it his imagination, or was the pace of change in the world just happening that much faster?
A knock at the door interrupted his reflections. Don muted the TV and turned to greet Mark Westlund. Mark wore a dress shirt with a loosened tie and rolled-up sleeves.
“You wanted to see me, Don?” Mark asked.
Don gestured at the open seat in front of his desk. “Come in, Mark. Close the door behind you, please.”
Mark’s look turned wary, but he followed Don’s instructions. He perched on the edge of his chair and eyed Don with caution.
