The Phoenix Affair by Dave Moyer (e book reader pc TXT) 📖

1245 in the morning. He wondered if he should take a sleeping pill. In the end training won out. A crusty old sergeant had once told him that soldiers, especially special ops soldiers, only grew old if they paid attention to instincts. Allen’s gut told him something wasn’t right. So he climbed out of bed. Grabbed the duffel with his weapons and ammunition. Found a watch cap in his own backpack and pulled it down over his ears. Shrugged into his black fleece jacket, pulled on his boots. He slipped out into the hall, and lugged the duffel up the stairs, past the maid’s quarters and out onto the roof.

It was dark, and quiet, and cold, low 50s at most and falling fast. He sniffed, the air was dry like it should be for the desert, but there was the faint smell of water and dampness and green from the villa gardens all around the compound. He looked down the lane toward the gate, which he could just see about 75 yards away in the starlight. Palm trees lining the lane cast faint shadows.

He took out the MP5 and laid it on the roof decking, rummaged in the duffel and produced the two pistols. He stuffed one in each pocket of the jacket. Felt around in the duffel some more and found what he was looking for. Picked up the long gun and removed the laser optical day sights from the top rail with the two thumb screws that attached it. Fastened the night sights to the rail and tightened the screws. He switched on the optics and lifted the gun to his shoulder.

A starlight scope is not like the infrared things in the movies, where everything is a varying shade of green, with the hot stuff bright green and the background a dark green-black. Instead the world is what it is, except brighter. The ambient light is amplified, and with starlight like on this night, in crystal clear air, low humidity, it was like looking at a daylight scene except in black and white. The palm trees were crisp and clear, their shadows dark against the lighter ground either side of the lane. The gate was there, the top of the wall. He panned the scope and the gun around the whole perimeter, looking at the wall and whatever he could see beyond. Nothing, all quiet, all as it should be on a Sunday night in Saudi Arabia.

He felt a little foolish, but on the other hand, that sergeant was a grizzled old veteran. He’d survived some bad stuff, Afghanistan in the Soviet time, out in the bush with the locals trying to gut you and the Russkies trying to kill you from hundreds of yards away with their sniper rifles. If it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t right was what he said in training. So Allen turned off his scope and put the MP5 on the roof decking against the wall facing the gate. He put the spare magazines there next to the gun, then opened the duffel’s zipper all the way and slipped his feet into it and covered his knees. Then he snuggled into the corner of the parapet wall, slipped on both gloves, pulled the watch cap down further over his ears and forehead. He was warm, and he relaxed and went to sleep around 0100 on Monday morning.

*****

At 6:30 pm DC time Jones was having a beer while steaks cooked on his neighbor’s outdoor grill. He’d had a relaxing Sunday. Up at a leisurely 7 am, a 3 mile run, about 150 pushups along the way. Breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, juice and some quality coffee. He’d watched the morning shows, read two DC papers and the Wall Street journal. Took a nap from 11 to 1, then watched the Nationals baseball game all afternoon. The steaks were thick, the neighbor was working the grill just right, ladies were in the kitchen doing whatever they were doing for the rest of the dinner, and things were looking pretty perfect in Jones’s world. The neighbor was just offering his opinion of the early season so far for the Nationals when the phone started to vibrate in Jones’s pocket.

He set the beer down and retrieved the device, looked at the number and gave an inward groan. He thumbed the “Talk” button and held the phone to his ear.

“Mr Jones?” a bodiless voice asked.

“Yes”.

“This is Ops. There is a situation. Are you secure there?”

“No. What kind of situation?”

“Nothing hot. But warm. We think you should take a look. You have people on an errand somewhere?”

“Yes, I do, in a warm place. Is it warm there now?”

“Yes, it’s warm. We’re wondering if it might get hot there soon.”

Jones did the math. “Middle of the night there. How soon?”

“We don’t know. Putting the pieces together, but it could be any time, maybe even the next few hours. We think you should take a look.”

Jones rolled his eyes and looked heavenward. The steaks smelled divine. The beer was cold. But somewhere it was warm and might get hot. Very bad if something happened to the DDO’s boy out there and he was here swilling beer and stuffing his face after taking a call. No way out.

“OK. I’m about 40 minutes away, be there as soon as I can. If something happens, or even begins to smell like it’s happening, call me on this number again. On my way now.”

He thumbed the “End” button and stuffed the phone in his pocket. Apologized to the neighbor and walked into the kitchen. Kissed his girlfriend and told her he had to go out. That was the good thing about this girlfriend: they had an understanding; sometimes he had to go “out” at awkward times and she knew not to make a fuss. She started doing the cover up thing with the neighbor’s wife that she did so well, no big deal, business thing in China or somewhere that it was Monday morning already. He made a mental note to keep her on…maybe he was getting old enough to get married.

He made it to Langley in 35 minutes and was in the Ops Center in 40. The Watch Officer flagged him down as he came through the door, and he walked across the floor past all the duty staff at their computer screens and into the glass-enclosed conference room at the back. There were already 3 young kids in there.

The Duty guy introduced himself as Wayne, “and this is Shirley, and Max, and Ted. Signals intel analyst, satellite guy, and our integration guy on the night/weekend shift. They think they’ve fused something together that you should take a look at.”

Jones looked across the table at the three analysts: none could have been more than 24 years old, maybe a year or two out of school at most. Max had glasses so thick they looked like the bottom of coke bottles. Shirley was Asian, and Ted was a nerd of biblical proportions. They looked excited.

“So, tell me about it,” Jones said. He was pretty sure he’d just passed on a great steak for no reason at all.

The three kids looked at each other briefly, seemed to elect a spokesman just as quickly, and Ted cleared his throat.

“A few days ago we picked up a cellular call originating on the northwestern Saudi border with Jordan. Lonely place in the middle of fucking nowhere. About 2 cars cross the border there in a week from what we can tell…we uh, did some checking to make sure this wasn’t pretty, you know, normal.”

“Go on,” Jones said.

“Well, the call flagged some keywords that got it logged by some computers over at Fort Meade. But not enough of them to get immediate attention. So it didn’t get a look from an analyst over there until late afternoon yesterday.”

“Do you have the text of the call?”

“We do, and a translation.”

“Well, what did the guy say?” Jones was losing patience…did he have to play 20 questions?

“It said: “An Air Force Brigadier just crossed into the Kingdom at al-Kaf. He travels with his family: two women, a teenager, and a small boy, four Saudi men, and three Americans. They’re moving in three GMC Suburban vehicles. The time is ten-thirty.”

“Holy Shit,” Jones came out of his chair. Those are my guys. Where was this? Show me on a map!”

Max reached for a remote on the table in front of him, pushed a series of buttons, the lights dimmed and a projector fired up and a map of Saudi Arabia appeared on the screen at the end of the room.

“Here, at al-Kaf, border crossing with Jordan.” He pushed a button. “This is a satellite shot of the crossing.” He was using a laser pointer. “This is the guard house, sleeping quarters, small kitchen, probably a couch and a TV. You can see the satellite dish…” he zoomed in and moved his laser dot around on the roof. He zoomed back out. “Over here is the outhouse…looks like they don’t have indoor plumbing. You can see their water tank here on the side of the main building. Looks like it gets trucked in every couple of days.”

“When was this?” Jones asked.

“Friday, about 1030 local time there in Jordan.”

Jones looked at Shirley, the Signals analyst. “Do we know who took the call?”

“Yes. Landline in Dhahran, a guy named Mohammed, which doesn’t help us at all of course.”

“Anything else on that landline, since then I mean?”

“Yes, there was one outgoing call and one incoming. Outgoing was to a cell phone that didn’t answer; we think that one has gone out of service. Incoming was from another cell phone, a number we have nothing on prior to this, and he got the answering machine. Listened to the same message and hung up. Clearly knew the code for the machine.”

“You got an address in Dhahran for that landline yet? That’s key.” Jones said.

“Not yet, we’re working on it, but addresses are pretty wacky in Saudi Arabia. Mostly we get driving directions we don’t understand, we’ll probably have to send someone to look for the place and then put it under surveillance if anyone authorizes the assets to do that.” She held up her hand to preempt Jones’s next question. “The original cell number called outgoing from the landline WAS something we had before, got that number on the daisy chain of phones that was rolled up in Paris last week. Somebody named Saleh in Paris called someone named Ibrahim, also in Paris, and this Ibrahim called this guy named Khalid in Saudi Arabia on that mobile number. We checked backward, and Khalid’s been getting around. He was in Bahrain last Tuesday and Wednesday, then in Dhahran Wednesday afternoon, Riyadh on Thursday morning, Taif later that afternoon, and Jeddah on Friday afternoon. His phone hasn’t been on the network since Friday, we figure he guessed everyone had his number after Paris and ditched it. The new number on the incoming call to the Dhahran landline is a prepaid phone out of Jeddah. That suggests it’s this Khalid guy, right? A call to his old cell, then the new cell calls and gets the message off the machine on the same landline?

“Do you have any call history for this Khalid last week before he ditched his phone?”

“Yes, we have all of the history since we got the number, nothing before that since it wasn’t flagged before. And not the text of the calls, not set up for that until after this one on Friday afternoon when our computers got hold of the numbers. Before that he made several calls to the same mobile number in the Dhahran area while he was there, then he called that mobile number again from Riyadh a day later. Called it again the last day the number was on the network, Thursday from Jeddah. On Thursday he also made about 25 other calls from Jeddah in a short time to numbers in Western Saudi Arabia.” Shirley stopped