Avenger (26 page)

The vice-president sales took the New York call in his office on the fifth floor of the headquarters building.

"I am ringing on behalf of the Zeta Corporation of Bermuda," said the voice. "You recall you sold us a Hawker 1000 tailfin number VP-BGG, you know, the British-owned one, some months back? I'm the new pilot."

"I surely do, sir. And who am I speaking with?"

"Only Mr. Zilic is not happy with the internal cabin configuration and would like it made over. Can you offer that facility?"

"Why certainly we do cabin interiors right here at the works, Mr. .. . er .. ."

"And it could have the necessary engine overhauls at the same time."

The executive sat up bolt straight. He recalled the sale very well.

Everything had been serviced to give a clear run of major items for a couple of years. Unless the new owner had been almost constantly airborne, the engines would not be due for overhaul for up to a year.

"May I enquire exactly who I am talking to? I do not think those engines are anywhere near to needing another overhaul," he said.

The voice at the other end lost its self-confidence and began to stutter.

"Really? Aw, Jeez. Sorry about that. Must have the wrong airplane."

The caller hung up. By now the vice-president sales was consumed with suspicion. To his recall he had never mentioned the sale of the registration of the British-sourced Hawker offered by the firm of

Avtech of Biggin Hill, Kent. He resolved to ask security to trace that call and try to establish who had made it.

He would be too late, of course, because the SIM-based mobile was heading into the East River. But in the meantime, he recalled the delivery pilot from the Zeta Corporation who had come up to Wichita to fly the Hawker to its new owner.

A very pleasant Yugoslav, a former colonel in that country's air force, with papers in perfect order including the full FAA records of the US flight school where he had converted to the Hawker. He checked his sales records: Captain Svetomir Stepanovic. And an email address.

He composed a brief email to alert the captain of the Hawker to the weird and troubling phone call and sent it. Across the landscaped grounds that surround the headquarters building, parked behind a clump of trees, Washington Lee scanned his electro-magnetic emanation monitor, thanked his stars the sales executive was not using the

Tempest system to shield his computer from such monitors, and watched the EEM intercept the message. The text was immaterial to him. It was the destination he wanted.

Two days later in New York, the motor home returned to the charter company, hard drive and software somewhere in the Missouri River,

Washington Lee pored over a map and pointed with a pencil tip.

"It's here," he said. "Republic of San Martin. About fifty miles east of San Martin City. And the airplane captain is a Yugoslav. I think you have your man, counsellor. And now, if you'll forgive me, I have a home, a wife, two kids and a business to attend to."

The Avenger got the biggest-definition maps he could find and blew them up even larger. Right at the bottom of the lizard-shaped isthmus of land that links North and South America, the broad mass of the South begins with Columbia to the west and Venezuela dead centre.

East of Venezuela lie the four Guyanas. First is the former British

Guyana, now called just Guyana. Next comes former Dutch Guyana, now

Surinam. Farthest east is French Guyana, home of Devil's Island and the story of Papillon, now home to Kourou, the European space-launch complex. Sandwiched between Surinam and the French territory, Dexter found the triangle of jungle that was once Spanish Guyana, named, post-independence, San Martin.

Further research revealed it was regarded as the last of the true banana republics, ruled by a brutal military dictator, ostracized, poor, squalid and malarial. The sort of place where money could buy a bucket of protection.

At the beginning of August the Piper Cheyenne II flew along the coast at a sedate 1250 feet, high enough not to arouse too much suspicion as little more than an executive proceeding from Surinam to French Guyana, but just low enough to allow good photography.

Chartered out of the airport at Georgetown, Guyana, the

Piper's 1200-mile range would take it just over the French border and back home again. The client, whose passport revealed him as US citizen

Alfred Barnes, now purported to be a developer of vacation resorts looking for possible situations. The Guyanese pilot privately thought he would pay not to vacation in San Martin, but who was he to turn down a perfectly good charter, paid for in cash dollars?

As requested, he kept the Piper just offshore so that his passenger, sitting in the right-hand co-pilot seat, could keep his zoom lens ready for use out of the window if occasion arose.

After Surinam and its border, the Commini River, dropped away, there were no suitable sandy beaches for miles. The coast was a tangle of mangrove, creeping through brown, snake-infested water from the jungle to the sea. They passed over the capital, San Martin City, asleep in the blazing soggy heat.

The only beach was east of the city, at La Bahia, but that was the reserved resort of the rich and powerful of San Martin, basically the dictator and his friends. At the end of the republic, ten miles short of the banks of the Maroni River and the start of French Guyana, was El

Punto.

A triangular peninsula, like a shark's tooth, jutting from the land into the sea; protected from the landward side by a sierra or cordillera of mountains from coast-to-coast, bisected by a single track over a single col. But it was inhabited.

The pilot had never been this far east, so the peninsula was, to him, simply a coastal triangle on his nav maps. He could see there was a kind of defended estate down there. His passenger began to take photographs.

Dexter was using a 35mm Nikon F5 with a motor drive that would give him five frames a second and get through his roll in seven seconds, but he absolutely could not afford to start circling in order to change film.

He was set for a very fast shutter speed, due to the aircraft vibration, which at any slower than 500 per second would cause blurring. With 400 ASA film and aperture set at f8, it was the best he could do.

On the first pass he got the mansion on the tip of the peninsula, with its protective wall and huge gate, plus the fields being tended by estate workers, rows of barns and farm buildings, and the chain-link fencing that separated the fields from the cluster of cuboid white cabanas that seemed to be the workers' village.

Several people looked up, and he saw two in uniform start to run. Then they were over the estate and heading for French territory. On the pass back, he had the pilot fly inland, so that from the right-hand seat he could see the estate from the landward angle. He was looking down from the peaks of the sierra at the estate running away to the mansion and the sea, but there was a guard in the col below the Piper who took its number.

He used up his second roll on the private airstrip running along the base of the hills, shooting the residences, workshops and the main hangar. There was a tractor pulling a twin-engined executive jet into the hangar and out of sight. The tailfin was almost gone. Dexter got one brief look at the fin before it was enveloped in the shadows. The number was P4-ZEM.

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

The Jesuit

PAUL DEVEREAUX, FOR ALL THAT HE WAS CONFIDENT THE FBI would not be allowed to dismantle his Project Peregrine, was perturbed by the acrimonious meeting with Colin Fleming. He underestimated neither the other man's intelligence, influence nor passion. What worried him was the threat of delay.

After two years at the helm of a project so secret that it was known only to CIA Director George Tenet and White House anti-terrorist expert

Richard Clarke, he was close, enticingly close, to springing the trap he had moved heaven and earth to create.

The target was simply called UBL. This was because the whole intelligence community in Washington spelled the man's first name,

Usama, using the letter "U' rather than the "O' favoured by the media.

By the summer of 2001 that entire community was obsessed by and convinced of a forthcoming act of war by UBL against the USA. Ninety per cent thought the onslaught would come against a major US interest outside America; only ten per cent could envisage a successful attack inside territorial USA.

The obsession ran through all the agencies, but mostly through the anti-terrorist departments of the CIA and the FBI. Here the intention was to discover what UBL had in mind and then prevent it.

Regardless of presidential edict 12333 forbidding 'wet jobs', Paul

Devereaux was not trying to prevent UBL; he was trying to kill him.

Early on in his career the scholar from Boston College had realized that advancement inside the Company would depend on some form of specialization. In his younger days, in the blaze of Vietnam and the

Cold War, most debutantes had chosen the Soviet Division. The enemy was clearly the USSR; the language to be learned was Russian. The corridors became crowded. Devereaux chose the Arab world and the wider study of Islam. He was regarded as crazy.

He turned his formidable intellect to mastering Arabic until he could virtually pass for an Arab, and studied Islam to the level of a Koranic scholar. His vindication came on Christmas Day 1979; the USSR invaded a place called Afghanistan and most of the agents inside CIA headquarters at Langley were reaching for their maps.

Devereaux revealed that, apart from Arabic, he spoke reasonable Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and had a knowledge of Pashto, spoken by the tribesmen right through Pakistan's Northwest Frontier and into

Afghanistan.

His career really took off. He was one of the first to argue that the

USSR had bitten off far more than it knew; that Afghan tribes would not concede any foreign occupation; that Soviet atheism offended their fanatical Islam; that with US material help a fierce mountain-based resistance could be fomented which would eventually bleed white General

Boris Gromov's Fortieth Army.

Before it was over, quite a bit had changed. The Mujahedin had indeed sent fifteen thousand Russian recruits back home in caskets; the occupation army, despite the infliction of hideous atrocities on the

Afghans, had seen their grip prised loose and their morale gutted.

It was a combination of Afghanistan and the arrival of Mikhail

Gorbachev that between them put the USSR on the final skid pan to dissolution and ended the Cold War. Paul Devereaux had switched from

Analysis to Ops and with Milt Bearden had helped distribute one billion dollars a year of US guerrilla hardware to the 'mountain fighters'.

While living rough, running, fighting through the Afghan mountains, he had observed the arrival of hundreds of young, idealistic, anti-Soviet volunteers from the Middle East, speaking neither Pashto nor Dari, yet prepared to fight and die far from home if need be.

Devereaux knew what he was doing there: he was fighting a superpower that threatened his own. But what were the young Saudis, Egyptians and

Yemenis doing there? Washington ignored them and Devereaux's reports.

But they fascinated him. Listening for hours to their conversations in

Arabic, pretending he had no more than a dozen words of a language he spoke fluently, the CIA man came to appreciate that they were fighting not communism but atheism.

More, they also entertained an equally passionate hatred and contempt for Christianity, the West and most specifically the USA. Among them was the febrile, temperamental, spoilt offspring of a hugely rich Saudi family, who distributed millions running training camps in the safety of Pakistan, funding refugee hostels, buying and distributing food, blankets and medicines to the other Mujahedin. His name was Usama.

He wanted to be taken as a great warrior, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but in fact he was only in one scrap, in late spring 1987, and that was it.

Milt Bearden called him a spoilt brat but Devereaux watched him carefully. Behind the younger man's endless references to Allah, there was a seething hatred that would one day find a target other than the

Russians.

Paul Devereaux returned home to Langley and a cascade of laurels. He had chosen not to marry, preferring scholarship and his job to the distractions of wife and children. His deceased father had left him wealthy; his elegant townhouse in old Alexandria boasted a much-admired collection of Islamic art and Persian carpets.

He tried to warn against the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan to its civil war after the defeat of Gromov, but the euphoria as the

Berlin Wall came down led to a conviction that, with the USSR collapsing into chaos, the Soviet satellites breaking westwards for freedom and world communism dead in the water, the last and final threats to the world's only remaining superpower were evaporating like mist before the rising sun.

Devereaux was hardly home and settled in when in August 1990 Saddam

Hussein invaded Kuwait. At Aspen President Bush and Margaret Thatcher, victors of the Cold War, agreed they could not tolerate such impudence.