Hood sat back. Rodgers’s career as a soldier included two tours of Vietnam, command of a mechanized brigade in the Persian Gulf, and leading a covert Striker operation into North Korea. Rodgers wasn’t going to run from a terrorist attack on a dam.
“You’re right about that,” Hood admitted. “Mike will want to stay. But Mike isn’t the one who has make that decision. We’ve also got Mary Rose, Phil, and Lowell in the saddle and they’re all civilians. I just wish we knew whether the attack was an isolated event or the first salvo of something larger.”
“Obviously, we’ll know more when we find out who’s responsible,” McCaskey said.
“Well give me something to chew on,” Hood said. “Who do you think was behind this?”
“I’ve spoken with the CIA and with the Turkish Special Forces, and also with the Mossad in Israel,” McCaskey said. “They’re all saying it’s either Syrians or Muslim fundamentalists within Turkey. There’s a strong argument for both. The Muslim Fundamentalists desperately want to weaken Turkey’s ties with Israel and the West. By attacking the infrastructure, they place a burden on the populace and turn them against the government.”
“If that’s the case,” Hood said, “we can expect more attacks.”
“Right,” McCaskey replied.
“Yeah, but I’m not going for that one,” Herbert said. “The fundamentalists are already pretty damn strong in Turkey. Why would they try to take by force what they can conceivably win on the next ballot?”
“Because they’re impatient,” McCaskey pointed out. “Iran is paying a lot of their bills and Tehran wants to see results.”
“Iran has already put Turkey in the ‘win’ column,” Herbert replied. “It’s just a matter of time. Their big playground now is Bosnia. They were outfitting the Bosnians with arms and advisors during the Balkan war. Not only are those advisors still there, they’re multiplying like guppies. That’s how the fundamentalists plan on getting into the heartland of Europe. As far as Turkey goes, Iran’s going to let the political situation move at its own pace.”
“Not if Turkey continues to rely more and more on Israeli military assets and on financial aid and intelligence from the United States,” McCaskey said. “Iran doesn’t want another U.S. stronghold in their backyard.”
“What about the Syrians?” Hood interjected. McCaskey and Herbert always went at each other like this, passionately but respectfully. Darrell Consensus and Bob Gut Instinct, psychologist Liz Gordon had once called them. That was why Hood had asked McCaskey to pop in when Herbert phoned that he had news about the attack. Between the two of them, Hood always ended up with a concise but comprehensive overview of a situation—though it was necessary to keep them from turning it into a political science debate.
“With the Syrians we have two possibilities,” McCaskey said. “The terrorists could be Syrian extremists who are sold on the idea of the Middle East becoming Greater Syria—”
“Adding it to their collection, like Lebanon,” Herbert said bitterly.
Hood nodded. It was the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that had cost the intelligence officer his wife and the use of his legs.
“Correct,” said McCaskey. “Or what seems more likely is that the dam-busters are Syrian Kurds.”
“They’re Kurds, all right,” Herbert said confidently. “Syrian extremists don’t do anything without the approval of the military, and the military takes its marching orders from the Syrian President himself. If the Syrian government wanted to spark hostilities with Turkey, they wouldn’t do it this way.”
“What would they do?” Hood asked.
“They’d do what aggressor nations always do,” Herbert said. “They’d hold war games on the border, massing troops there and provoking an incident to draw the Turks over. The Syrians would never set foot in Turkey. As we used to say in the military, they like receiving. It goes back to 1967 when Israeli tanks rolled in on the third day of the Six-Day War. Defending their homeland makes Syrians look and feel like freedom fighters instead of like aggressors. That helps to rally other Arab nations around them.”
“In addition to which,” McCaskey added, “except for 1967, the Syrians generally like to fight proxy wars. They gave arms to Iran to fight Iraq in 1982, let the Lebanese kill each other during fifteen years of civil war, then went in and set up a puppet regime—that sort of thing.”
Herbert looked at McCaskey. “Then you agree with me?”
“No.” McCaskey grinned. “You agree with me.”
“So assuming Bob is right,” Hood said, “why would Syrian Kurds attack Turkey? How do we know they weren’t acting as agents for Damascus? They may have been sent to Turkey to pick a fight.”
“The Syrian Kurds would sooner attack Damascus than Turkey,” Herbert said. “They hate the current regime.”
“The Kurds have also become increasingly empowered by the Palestinian example,” McCaskey said. “They want their own state.”
“Though even getting that won’t bring them peace,” Herbert said. “They’re Sunni Muslims and they don’t want to be mixed with the Shiite Muslims and the rest of the population. That’s the big war they’ve been fighting in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. But put the Sunnis together in a new Kurdistan and their four branches—the Hanafites, Malikites, the Shafites, and the Hanbalites—will start tearing each other apart.”
“Maybe not,” McCaskey said. “The Jews have strong differences of opinion in Israel, but they coexist.”
“That’s because the Israelis believe more or less the same thing in terms of religion,” Herbert said. “It’s politics where they differ. With the Sunnis, there are some very basic, very serious religious differences.”
Hood learned forward. “Would the Syrian Kurds be acting alone or with other Kurdish nationalists?”
“That’s a good question,” McCaskey said. “If the Kurds are behind the dam attack, it’s much more ambitious than anything they’ve tried in the past. You know, raiding weapons depots or attacking military patrols, that sort of thing. My feeling is that for something this big they’d have needed the help of the Turkish Kurds, who’ve been fighting their government from strongholds in the east for the last fifteen years or so.”
“And joining with them,” Hood said, “what would the Syrian Kurds hope to do?”
“Destabilize, the region,” Herbert replied. “If Syria and Turkey were to bash away at one another while the Syrian and Turkish Kurds unified, they could become a power in the region by default.”
“Not only by default,” McCaskey said. “Assume they use the distraction of war to dig in all along the Turkish and Syrian border. Infiltrate villages, cities, and mountains, set up mobile camps in the desert. They could wage an intractable guerrilla war like Afghanistan lasting for years.”
“And whenever the pressure got too intense in one country,” Herbert said, “the Kurds could simply slip into the other. Or else they join with the Kurds in Iraq to bring that country into the fray. Can you imagine an ongoing war involving those three nations? How long before nuclear or chemical weapons are used? How long before Syria or Iraq realizes that Israel is supplying the Kurds—”
“Which they’ve been doing for years,” said McCaskey.
“—and starts chucking missiles at them?”
“Eventually,” McCaskey said, “when there’s a peace settlement, it will have to deal with the Kurdish issue in order to be effective. So the Kurds get a homeland, Turkey embraces the fundamentalists, and democracy and the United States are the big losers.”
“If there’s a peace settlement,” Herbert said portentously. “We’re talking about thousands of years of animosity being unleashed on a large scale. If that genie is ever let out of the bottle, it might be impossible to put him back in.”
Hood understood. He also knew that it wasn’t the responsibility of Op-Center to plan for a war in the Middle East. His job was to spot “hot situations” and manage them if they became “crises.” Once they evolved from that into “policy problems,” it was up to the White House to handle them. The President would let him know what help was needed and where. The question was, what could be done to manage this developing crisis?
Hood turned to his keyboard and typed in the extension of his executive assistant, Stephen “Bugs” Benet. A moment later the young man’s face appeared on the screen.
“Good morning, Paul,” Bugs said, his voice coming from speakers mounted on the side of the monitor.
“Morning, Bugs,” Hood said. “Would you please get Mike Rodgers for me? He’s still at the ROC.”
“Right away,” Bugs said. His image winked off.
Hood glanced at Herbert. “What’s Mike doing to find that missing helicopter?”
“Same thing we are,” Herbert replied. “Analyzing data. He’s in a better position to scan communications in the region, so I’m sure he’s doing that too. He’ll be following all the procedures we wrote up for ROC operations.”
“What’s the minimum security requirement you established for the ROC?” Hood asked.
“Two Strikers when the facility is in the field,” Herbert said. “That’s what they’ve got now.”