Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) (7 page)

“Which carrier?” Rat asked.

“The USS
Belleau Wood
. Have you ever been aboard it?”

Rat suppressed a smile. “Yeah, couple of times. Kind of old, but in really good shape.”

“What do you think?”

“I told you. I wouldn’t do it unless you really want to stay in the Navy for a career. Decide that first.”

Andrea nodded silently as her mind wandered away from Rat and to the question of whether to stay in the Navy for twenty or more years.

Captain Tim Satterly, the surgeon of the
Belleau Wood
, bent over the unconscious man in his sick bay. Ever since reporting Mazmin’s condition to Captain Hogan and confronting the American wearing a Sudanese Army uniform—probably illegal under the laws of war, Satterly thought—his concern had grown. The man had been mostly unconscious for the better part of two days. The IV antibiotics were having no effect. His fever continued to rage. The chest X rays showed the fluid in the top third of both lungs, and the amount increasing with every hour. Satterly had seen numerous cases of pneumonia. He couldn’t recall one that started in the upper lobes, and he had never seen a case he couldn’t stop. He knew people died from pneumonia every day, but never in his hands. He had also never seen a case get so bad so quickly.

Mazmin was the only one in sick bay. He lay in the middle bed in the middle room, with unoccupied beds to his left and right over immaculate waxed green tile. Dr. Satterly wore his khaki uniform under his white medical coat. He put the electronic ear-thermometer in the man’s ear canal and received an instantaneous reading—105 degrees. Satterly shook his head. He listened to the man’s labored breathing through his stethoscope. He looked once again at the oxygen number from the clip attached to Mazmin’s forefinger. Sixty percent, and going down. They were fighting a losing battle.

Satterly was haunted by what this prisoner had said. Tortured, nearly drowned. On a table in a room surrounded by blood and death. The pneumonia he was battling could easily have been caused by the trauma he had described, depending on what was in the water that went into his lungs. He was aware of the risk of believing a prisoner. He had dealt with enough brig rats on the ship and criminals on their way to Leavenworth to realize they could be very creative in their accusations—always close enough to reality to be difficult to disprove. But Satterly found it hard to believe that this prisoner would come to the ship a few hours after his capture with a cohesive story supported by medical evidence that he couldn’t control.

Satterly’s face reddened again as he thought of the cowboy Special Forces operative torturing a prisoner, violating the Geneva Convention and probably ten other things.
Just like the terrorists
. The War on Terrorism was a moral war; from his perspective it would be lost when the moral high ground was abandoned. The man lying in front of him showed that either it had been abandoned, or those responsible for preserving the moral high ground didn’t care. Ends were fast becoming more important than means.

He took the latest chest X ray and jammed it up onto the light box hanging on the bulkhead. It showed faint indications of what might be foreign substances in the lungs, which could account for the aggressiveness of the infection.

Lieutenant Chris Murphy, his assistant surgeon, was equally puzzled. They both knew, without saying, that Mazmin was beyond saving. They felt helpless. No one had ever died in sick bay from a sickness since either of them reported to the
Belleau Wood
. Others had died from trauma, but never from sickness. “What do you think, Captain?”

“I think if he doesn’t start responding to the antibiotics immediately we’re going to lose him.” He looked at the ice packs surrounding the man’s neck and head and under his arms.

“What’s making him go so
fast
?”

Satterly pointed to the X rays. “Foreign bodies in his lungs. He sucked something into his lungs.”

Murphy couldn’t believe it. “How?”

Satterly gave him a knowing, disapproving look. “Is there any doubt?” He watched Mazmin labor in his attempts to breathe. “If he dies, I’m not going to let it rest. I’m going to make sure whoever is responsible for this will pay for it.”

“How?”

Satterly didn’t respond.

“So our guy here,” Murphy said. “If he got tortured like he said, would that cause him to get an infection like this? And how would he get foreign substances if all they were doing was pouring water down his throat?”

“I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I guess we should consider he has some rare African disease we’re not familiar with. But it sure looks like regular old pneumonia to me.”

“What should we do?”

Satterly pulled the X ray off the light box, and turned it off. “We’re doing everything we can. We’ve got him on our strongest antibiotic, we’ve given him shots, we’re cooling him down, and we’re making no progress. We just have to keep monitoring him and hope he turns around soon, or he’s not going to be with us long.”

Rat walked straight to the Counterterrorism Center, the CTC, that consumed acres of space on the ground floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He walked across the crowded, humming area full of cubicles where most of the people worked in a frenetic environment. He had never been to the CTC before the War on Terrorism; the Navy’s counterterrorism unit didn’t work with the CIA except in extraordinary circumstances—circumstances that Rat had never encountered.

He had heard that before September 11 there had been about five hundred analysts in the CTC. Now there were more than eleven hundred. Twenty-five hundred cables a day poured in from sources as diverse as those interrogating prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign intelligence services passing on tips on terrorist organizations. Instead of trucking pizzas in all night as had occurred regularly after 9/11, the CIA cafeteria had agreed to stay open on nights and weekends to accommodate the increased activity.

The CTC ground out five hundred terrorism intelligence reports a month, which were distributed to eighty different government agencies. A video conference was held three times a day with the National Security Council. And every day at five in the afternoon, Stewart Woods, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, summoned the forty senior officers from the CTC, the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, to the conference room just off his seventh-floor office for a grilling on the day’s terrorism intelligence. And it all swirled around Don Jacobs.

Rat looked for Jacobs, the Director of Counterterrorism, the man for whom Rat worked during his current temporary assignment from the Navy to the CIA’s SAS. Jacobs was unrelenting. He didn’t eat or sleep, or not so anyone else could tell, and thought of nothing except how to kill or capture those in the world who were sworn to destroy the United States. He wanted to find the barns they were hiding in and burn them down. Rat couldn’t agree more. He loved Jacobs’s vision and attitude. It was Jacobs who had made his new assignment exciting, who got his juices flowing. It was the promise of action, not just endless training for future missions that never happened. And Jacobs promised creative, one-off missions, not searching for lost al Qaeda in caves in Pakistan that much of the Special Forces community had been relegated to. It was a picture Rat couldn’t resist.

Jacobs had been right, too. Rat had been on numerous missions that had been creative, bold, and successful. There had been a twinge of Washington that Rat didn’t care for, like an unwanted spice in an otherwise delicious meal, but given everything else he liked about his temporary position at the CIA, it was worth it. Or at least so far.

Rat headed to Jacobs’s office. As he walked across the large CTC area he was reminded of how different it was after years of being a naval officer and working with the SEALs. There was much more of a sense of working in an office, being a bureaucrat. That was part of what he was supposed to remedy in his time at the Agency. A large task, he noted. The Agency reduced everything to the lowest common denominator. The intelligence that got passed on, the analysis that made it into the reports, was the analysis they could get everyone to sign off on. The truly bold, insightful, or creative analysts were sandpapered down to commonality by those around them and especially those above them. Rat had seen enough intelligence reports to know they weren’t usually helpful. Not only were they watered down by analysts trying to please every boss, but they relied almost exclusively on satellite intelligence. They were excellent in saying that a certain number of tanks had moved from A to B, but virtually worthless in predicting what a person or regime might do with those tanks. It was the result of the American obsession with satellites and technology. Easy to raise a billion dollars for another satellite, but there was no money to raise the salaries of the analysts, who made less than plumbers.

But Rat didn’t expect to solve any of that. He just kept it in mind. He had been brought to the Agency to put a little kick in their Special Forces. He had been doing just that. Don Jacobs appreciated the skill he had brought to the SAS, the Special Activities Staff, as it was euphemistically called.

Rat reached Jacobs’s office and was surprised to find him there. The door was open. He knocked.

Jacobs looked up. “Well, look what the cat drug in.” He smiled. He stood and shook Rat’s hand. “Good work. Brilliant, even. I’ll bet you were about to wet your pants to see who got to drop in on Duar.”

Rat smiled. “You always wonder how big a hornet’s nest you’re jumping into. If he had thirty guys spread out, we’d have had our hands full. But it worked out.”

“How long you been in town?”

“Night before last.”

Jacobs raised his eyebrows as he sat back down, wondering why Rat hadn’t checked in before now. “What’s her name?”

“Andrea.”

“Right. You told me about her before.”

“Yes, sir. Former Blue Angels flight surgeon.”

“Right. When do I get to meet her?”

“Whenever you want. But I thought you liked being the mysterious boss who was heard about but never seen.”

“Always like to meet the pretty women.”

“Did I say she was pretty?”

Jacobs smiled. He looked at Rat’s tan face and intense eyes. He was striking. Very unlikely he would date a homely woman. “I’ve read your draft report. Sounds like it went by the numbers. All because of your plan. I must say it was pretty ingenious. Good report too, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

Jacobs gave him a knowing look. “I’m going to put you in for some special recognition for this one. It was yours.”

Rat looked away, embarrassed. “You don’t need to do anything—”

“I want to.”

“I was thinking of taking some leave.”

“What for?”

“Just some time off. Would that be a problem?”

“We’ve been talking about that training that you were going to do.”

Rat frowned.

“Small-boat training. You’re the expert in maritime activities. Right?”

“And?”

“And you’re supposed to spread your wisdom to others. Teach them how to drive boats, go fast, I don’t know. All that boat shit.”

“Right.”

“Set for next week.”

“Oh,” Rat said, disappointed.

“Down at The Point.”

“When?”

“Monday. First thing.”

Rat nodded unenthusiastically as he stood to leave Jacobs’s office.

“One other thing,” Jacobs said. “That surgeon aboard the
Belleau Wood
could be a problem. He’s screaming hard and loud. He has a hard-on about one of the captured terrorists. Claims you tortured him.”

Rat didn’t respond.

“So?”

“What?”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Torture him?”

“I interrogated him. He’s the one who told us where Duar was. Without him, we wouldn’t have found Duar. He’d still be out there plotting to kill a few hundred thousand Americans.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, but if this is going to get ugly, I need to know now how big a fight we’re going to have.” He looked at Rat’s face. “I’m on your side.”

“I appreciate it,” Rat said. “I’ve got to get going.”

“That’s it?” Jacobs stood in amazement as Rat walked out of his office and closed the door behind him. “Rat!”

John Johnson twirled a pencil in his left hand as he moved the laser mouse deftly with his right. He had wasted enough time already looking at news sites. He spent the first half hour of work every day in his job at the NSA, the National Security Agency, reading the latest news on-line. He read the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post, USA Today
, CNN.com, the
London Times
, even his hometown newspaper, the
Albuquerque Journal
, and the student newspaper at his alma mater, the New Mexico Military Institute, where he had completed his two-year degree. He kept track of everything he wanted to on the Internet. He was a master of the Internet in part because it was now his job. He spent most of every day on-line, looking for one thing—terrorists.

He closed the window for the
New York Times
, took a deep breath and a deep gulp of coffee as he prepared to descend into the pits, into the seedy side of his job. Much to his dismay, he had discovered that one of the favorite places for terrorists to communicate with anonymity was in chat rooms on pornography sites. He closed his eyes momentarily and logged on to one of the many pornography sites to which he subscribed. He generally liked his job, but having to search pornography sites every day disgusted him. It was corrosive, debasing. The first images quickly came onto his screen. He gritted his teeth. He could be as moved as the next man by the sight of a beautiful woman scantily clothed. But this stuff was horrendous. Terrorists used these sites because they apparently didn’t expect governments to look for them there.

Two years ago Johnson had been asked to participate in a newly formed group to decide how best to capitalize on the Internet, how to best use it to their advantage. The Internet had made the NSA’s work much more difficult. The volume of electronic traffic had gone up exponentially every year since the Internet had become commonplace. It enabled people to communicate in ways that were difficult to discover.