Assassins edge, p.22
Assassin's Edge, page 22
In any number of ways, it was poor tradecraft on the part of the sender: using a postal box to begin, and listing it as a return address on a letter. NSA’s success became complete when its recognition software got a hit on the man. The face captured by the camera was one that U.S. intelligence agencies were quite familiar with: a top-tier mercenary recruiter named Zamir Bagdani.
FORTY
Slaton was tipped back in his chair, feet on the cluttered table and hands clasped behind his neck, when Director Nurin appeared at the open door of his workroom. Slaton glanced at him once, then went back to ruminating. Without comment, the director began studying the board.
Slaton had never worked for Nurin—not directly—so he lacked the bond he shared with Anton Bloch. Or for that matter, with Sorensen. The same would be true in the inverse. Nurin knew him largely by reputation, although Slaton had aided Israel under his watch. Even so, the trust requisite in such relationships—particularly given their roles as spy chief and assassin—had never been forged. For everyone’s sake, they both needed to get past it.
“Any luck?” Nurin finally said.
“It’s not a matter of luck. It about effort, putting the loose pieces together.”
“As with masonry? Anton mentioned your new sideline.”
“Everyone has a calling.”
Nurin turned away from the board, waited for Slaton to meet his gaze. “David, I know your history with the Office was not without … difficulties.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But I’m past it. Right now, I’d say we have parallel interests.”
“Do we? My duty is to keep Israel safe. I sense your involvement has become more personal.”
“As long as our goals are aligned, motives are immaterial.” He got up and wandered to the board. “But someone else’s motives … those matter very much.”
Nurin waited as Slaton stood contemplating the board, hands on his hips.
“I learned a good lesson during that op to Wrangel. Something that actually saved my life.”
“What was that?”
“It might sound contrived, but it has to do with compasses. Geographic north and the north pole aren’t one and the same. Most people know that, in a general way, but I was in a position where it really mattered. I understood that while the needle might not be accurate in the conventional sense, it was always consistent.”
He picked up a marker and wrote one word in the center circle.
“Lazarus,” said Nurin. “This is where your compass points?”
“He steered Mossad into a disaster, and went to great lengths to do it. I think he’s somebody we know.” Slaton explained his suspicions about the limp, outlined how they might use it to identify him.
“It’s a good thought,” Nurin agreed. “I’ll put someone on it immediately.”
The secure phone Slaton had been given chirped a call. He picked it up and heard Sorensen’s voice.
“We’ve made an ID that should help,” she said.
“Lazarus?” Slaton asked hopefully.
“No, but maybe the next best thing.”
“Director Nurin is with me—I’m going to put you on speaker.”
Slaton did, and she continued. “We’ve been trying to unravel EDG Industries. We got lucky and were able to identify a letter they sent to a law firm in New York.” She explained how NSA had tracked it to a post office in Albania, and then identified the sender. “The name is Zamir Bagdani.”
It meant nothing to Slaton, yet he saw a flicker in Nurin’s gaze. “The arms merchant,” the director ventured.
“That’s the one. I’m guessing we both have a file on him.” Sorensen paused, a voice in the background interrupting. She said, “Let me call you right back—I’m needed in the operations center. I’ll fill you in soon.”
* * *
It had taken an hour to get the boarding party prepped and briefed. Once they were ready, Bainbridge closed the gap quickly. The captain wasn’t sure if his counterpart on Atlas knew he was being followed—they weren’t seeing any sign of radar activity from that direction. Either way, he wanted to give his quarry as little time as possible to react.
Bainbridge closed to within two hundred yards of the smaller ship, which was still wallowing along at four knots. At that point, Bainbridge slowed and two rigid-hull inflatables were winched quickly down the port side. Each boat held eleven men. All wore body armor, and they carried an impressive array of weapons: M4 carbines, Mossberg 500 shotguns, and Beretta M9s.
The team spanned the divide to Atlas in minutes, and boarding nets were launched upward, snagging firmly on the rails. The lead element began climbing, and after receiving an all clear, the rest of the team followed, save for one man to safeguard each boat.
The unit began leapfrogging ahead, clearing corners and passageways, coordinating with hand signals. As they made their way toward the bridge, they encountered no resistance whatsoever, and in fact saw not a single crewmember. Chances were, at midnight local time, most of the crew would be in their bunks. All the same, the commander of the VBSS team, a lieutenant, felt doubts beginning to encroach.
Fearing the crew might be bunkered up for an ambush, he ordered a pause in their advance. He scoped out the deck ahead, a wash of green-scale hues in his night optic, and still saw no movement anywhere. The team was one deck below the bridge, which was their primary objective. If they could control that high ground, they would control the ship. The ladder leading up to the bridge was thirty yards ahead across mostly open deck.
He keyed his mic to give a sitrep to Bainbridge’s command center, knowing full well his words were being transmitted halfway around the world. “We’re on board, no resistance, no sign of the crew. I can see the bridge, but there’s only one window from this angle and it doesn’t give much of a look. This is weird. There’s not a soul in sight.”
Bainbridge’s captain replied, “Copy all. Standby…”
* * *
Sorensen had returned to the Situation Room to watch the operation in the Indian Ocean play out. The usual duty staff were there, but President Cleveland was not. The only NSC member joining her was the JCS chairman—it was, after all, a Navy operation. The small room was wired for big missions, and two large monitors beamed a pair of images from nine times zones away. One was a night-vision view from the midships deck of Atlas, the jittery body cam of the VBSS team commander. Next to that was a God’s-eye view of the entire ship fed from a drone Bainbridge had launched to support the mission.
The team was presently holding in cover halfway to the bridge. The operation had gone smoothly so far, but caution reigned, and options on how to proceed were being weighed. The Navy was overseeing the mission at Fleet level, and as Sorensen watched it all play out, she arranged for another secure call to Slaton. While that ran its course, she caught snippets of the mission audio—enough to recognize that the lieutenant leading the team seemed spooked.
Slaton answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”
“A lot, actually. I’m sitting here watching an op go down. We’ve been shadowing Atlas, the ship we suspect of screwing with Ross’s navigation. She’s in the Indian Ocean now. The president is getting impatient for answers, and she authorized the Navy to interdict. A team just boarded and I’m watching it all go down in real time.”
“Gotta love technology,” said Slaton, having himself featured in many such videos.
“Which brings us back to my reason for calling. Atlas is owned by EDG Industries, and now that we’ve tied Bagdani to that company, we’d like to get Mossad’s help researching him.”
“Agreed. Nurin is already on it—he stepped out a few minutes ago to make it happen.”
“Good. If we can find Bagdani, he might lead us to Lazarus. What’s new on your end?” Sorensen waited for a response but got only silence.
“David?” she prompted.
“How’s the raid going?” he asked out of nowhere.
Doing her best to multitask, she went back to the streaming images. “No change. Our team has been on board roughly five minutes. So far, no resistance. In fact, from the comments I’ve heard, no sign of the crew whatsoever.”
A pause on the Tel Aviv end. “That’s strange,” Slaton said.
“Is it?”
“How much of the ship have they covered?”
“They’re still above deck, working their way toward the bridge. They paused for a conference a couple of minutes ago. The guy leading the unit—”
“Abort!” Slaton shouted.
Sorensen pulled the phone abruptly away from her ear, her full attention back on the call. “What? Why?”
“Get that team out! Order them to pull back!”
Before she could ask why a second time, Slaton said, “Almaty!”
And with that, it clicked. Sorensen felt it as well, an icy fear. Impending disaster. She looked at the images, saw the team stalled on a deserted deck. Sometimes you didn’t need to be near trouble to smell it. Sometimes you could do that from half a world away.
“Break it off!” Sorensen shouted, dropping the secure handset.
The JCS chairman, who was in direct comm with Fleet headquarters, shot her a look of annoyance.
Sorensen stood and leaned across the table and put herself right in his face. “Order that team back! Pull them out now!”
The general, a weathered warrior with an iron-gray crew cut, stammered, “Why would—”
“That’s an order, dammit! Just do it!”
FORTY-ONE
Chains of command were a funny thing. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was U.S. Army, and he was sitting overwatch of a Navy mission. Sorensen had no military command authority whatsoever. It was an increasingly common dilemma in the era of joint operations: multiple services, different agencies, various pay grades. Competing missions and rules of engagement. Often the principal players had never worked together and were the product of varying cultures. Yet in that moment, in the gone-silent White House Situation Room, one thing was crystal clear: the depth of Sorensen’s conviction.
The general didn’t understand what was behind it, but it registered loud and clear. He gave the abort order to Fleet headquarters, who quickly forwarded it to Bainbridge. When word finally reached the lieutenant on Atlas’s deck, the relief in his voice was palpable as he instructed his team to pull back from their incursion of what felt like a ghost ship.
The boarding party descended quickly to their boats, and soon the rigid inflatables were skipping over two-foot seas back to Bainbridge. They’d barely covered half the divide when a massive explosion rocked the night.
The lieutenant instinctively ducked as the shock wave hammered the boats, but incredibly neither capsized. Bits of shrapnel punctured both inflatable hulls, yet the manufacturer’s promise held: on the same principle as run-flat tires, they remained seaworthy over the final hundred yards. More alarmingly, two of his team were wounded: one took a shard of metal in his neck, barely missing the carotid artery, while another suffered an arm wound. Everyone climbed back on Bainbridge with ringing ears, and the ship’s medical staff immediately went to work.
On Bainbridge herself, the shock wave blew out reinforced windows along the port-side superstructure, and the ship’s antenna suite was peppered with damage. It could have been worse. It would ultimately be determined—based on residue taken from various bits of floating wreckage, along with a bill of lading from a port call two months earlier—that Atlas had been hauling twenty-one tons of ammonium nitrate in her aft hold.
The smoking shell of the old trawler began listing immediately, and her hull buckled at a mid-station bulkhead. Her back broken, Atlas turtled to port amid great geysers of venting air. She disappeared beneath the waves five minutes later, her bent rudder waving a final goodbye to the world.
In the Situation Room, Sorensen watched the scene unfold with surreal detachment. Both monitors had blanked for a time, but a feed from Bainbridge was quickly reestablished—the drone camera never came back, the aircraft no doubt vaporized. Amid a cloud of smoke in the infrared image, Sorensen saw an empty sea where Atlas had been. All that remained was a churn of bubbles and a feeble oil slick.
She looked down and saw the secure handset she’d been using to talk to Slaton—it was hanging from the table by its cord, twirling like a spent yo-yo. She picked it up, and asked in a hollow voice, “Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” Slaton said. “I think I gather what happened.”
She took a deep breath. “Right, well … that was a good call. Thanks.”
* * *
Details on Bagdani came thick and fast. Mossad and the CIA scoured their databases independently and both got hits. It was Mossad, however, that kept the thicker file, and for reasons director Nurin was loath to admit—Israel had twice undertaken quiet dealings with him.
Bagdani’s origins were obscure. Based on his accent, it was suspected he’d been born in the Balkans. His background became tangible on the day he turned nineteen, when he signed on for a stint in the French Foreign Legion. Mossad actually had copies of his service records, covering an unremarkable four years in Africa. It was after this period that he made his true mark.
Bagdani leveraged contacts made in the service to become a top-tier arms merchant. His customer base was extensive, deals made on every continent. He mostly sourced personnel, and for all manner of buyers: legitimate governments, strongmen, oligarchs, militias. In recent years, he’d specialized in recruiting niche, hard-to-find specialties. EOD teams for land mine removal, mechanics for light attack aircraft, cyber experts who specialized in Bitcoin mining.
Mossad had contracted with Bagdani on two occasions—the reason they’d researched him so thoroughly. Once had been to recruit local help in Mali, a few tactically oriented translators to help free an Israeli diplomat taken hostage by al-Shabab. Later, he had helped hire a South African consultant who was an expert on electrical grids, and who also, by no coincidence, had been the primary architect of Iran’s national network.
Aside from those contracts, for which he’d been paid a healthy commission, Bagdani had never been viewed by Mossad as more than a curiosity. Now he was central to everything. On Nurin’s orders, sources around the region were canvassed, and it quickly became apparent that Bagdani had made few deals in the last year. At least two regular customers claimed he’d ignored potentially lucrative contracts. For ten months, no one had seen or heard from him.
Which stoked Nurin’s suspicions only further.
* * *
The sinking of Atlas, not to mention the manner in which she’d gone down, put the CIA’s interest in the other ship they were tracking into overdrive.
After following Sibir through the Bering Sea, across the North Pacific, and into the Sea of Japan, the operations center staff watched intently as she slid behind a breakwater in Kimchaek, North Korea. The port was on North Korea’s Pacific shore, and while it was not a major shipping or logistics hub, it was the nearest harbor that could accept a ship of Sibir’s size.
The former Kazakhstan icebreaker sided up to the main pier, and mooring lines were thrown into place. Every eye in the ops center was glued to the satellite feed, waiting to see what happened next.
For a time, the answer was nothing. No gangway was set in place, no cranes went into action, and no crew disembarked. The icebreaker simply sat there, silent and still. Like a convict in an orange jumpsuit trying to blend in at a wedding.
And with that, the waiting game began.
FORTY-TWO
The procurement of raw intelligence is a broad church, and Mossad and the CIA held nothing back in their hunt for Zamir Bagdani. They began by lasering in on the last point of contact: the post office in Tirana, Albania.
Personnel from both embassy stations, armed with little more than a photo of Bagdani, spread out to bars and wharves to buy rounds of drinks. Analysts in Langley and Tel Aviv scoured photo-surveillance and signals intelligence, and immersed themselves in chat rooms and social media platforms, looking and listening for any sign of the notorious arms dealer.
Their break came in a dank watering hole on the outskirts of a village called Kodër-Thumanë, and for the most bewildering of reasons—a rivalry between two Italian soccer clubs. A bartender in a waterside pub was approached by a customer he’d never seen, a rough-looking character with dark features, a pitted face, and the most unfathomable of accents. The man ordered a beer and chatted about the weather before holding out a photograph and saying, “I am looking for this man.”
The bartender was justifiably cautious. “You are police?”
“Do I look like a policeman?”
The bartender shrugged to concede the point.
“I need a job, and I was told he hires men like me.”
The barkeep scratched his brown-stubble chin. “I’ve seen him, a Juve man. He comes here sometimes for the games.”
The Mossad officer nodded as if he understood. When the bartender went to pour a beer for another customer, he pulled out his phone. He quickly looked up “Juve” and learned that the reference was to Juventus, a famous Italian soccer club. He also noticed a red-and-black scarf tacked to the wall behind the bar, and a closer inspection revealed the logo of a different team, AC Milan. A second phone search confirmed his suspicions: AC Milan and Juventus were hardened rivals.
He sensed opportunity.
The Mossad man quickly drained his mug, and when the bartender came to refill it, he said, “A Juve man. He is Italian then?”
A spit of derision. “No, he is an armb.”
It was a term the Israeli knew well, referring to the local mafia. He nodded understandingly. “Still, I need the job. Maybe he lives nearby?”
The bartender’s gaze narrowed, yet his caution seemed overridden by disdain.
