1201
Loomis then used her cellular phone to call headquarters. Maybe it wasn’t enough to take to a judge or a U.S. attorney, but it was enough to talk to another agent about.
ONE OTHER POTENTIAL subject wasn’t completely clear yet, O’Day noted. There was Raman, and a black agent whose wife was a Muslim and who was evidently trying to convert her husband–but the agent had discussed it with his comrades, and there was a notation in his file that this agent’s marriage, like others in the Service, was on shaky ground.
The phone rang.
“Inspector O’Day.”
“Pat? It’s Sissy.”
“How’s Raman looking?” He’d worked three cases with her, all involving Russian spies. The cheerleader had the jaw of a pit bull once she got onto something.
“The message on his phone, the wrong number?”
“Yeah?”
“Our rug merchant was calling a dead person whose wife is allergic to wool,” Loomis told him.
Click.
“Keep going, Sis.” She read off her notes and the information garnered by the people who’d entered the dealer’s apartment.
“This one feels real, Pat. The tradecraft is just too good. Right out of the book. It looks so normal that you don’t think about it. But why the pay phone, except that he’s worried somebody might have a tap on his phone? Why call a dead man by mistake? And why did the wrong number go to somebody on the Detail?”
“Well, Raman’s out of town.”
“Keep him there,” Loomis advised. They didn’t have a case. They were still struggling for probable cause. If they arrested Alahad, he’d have the sense to ask for a lawyer–and what did they have? He’d made a phone call. He wouldn’t have to defend the call. He just had to say nothing. His lawyer would say it was all some kind of mistake–Alahad might even have a plausible explanation
1202
already prepared; he’d keep that one in his pocket, of course–ask for evidence, and the FBI would have nothing to show.
“That tips our hand, too, doesn’t it?”
“Better safe than sorry, Pat.”
“I have to take this to Dan. When are you tossing the shop?”
“Tonight.”
THE TROOPERS OF the Blackhorse were thoroughly exhausted. Fit and desert-trained soldiers that they were, they’d spent two-thirds of a day in airplanes with dry air, sitting in cramped seats, their personal weapons in the overhead bins–that always got a curious reaction from the stewardesses–and then arrived eleven time zones away in blazing heat. But they did what they had to do.
First came gunnery. The Saudis had established a large shooting range for their own use, with pop-up steel targets as close as three hundred meters and as far as five thousand. Gunners bore-sighted their weapons, then tried them out, using real ammunition instead of practice, then learned that the war shots were far more accurate, the projectiles flying “right through the dot,” meaning the circular reticle in the center of their sighting systems. Once off the transport trailers, drivers exercised their mounts to make sure that everything worked properly, but the tanks and Bradleys were in the nearly mint condition promised on the flight over. Radio checks were made so that everyone could talk to everyone else. Then they verified the all-important IVIS data links. The more mundane tasks came last of all. The Saudi-deployed Ml A2s did not yet have the newest modification to the vehicle series, pallet-loaded ammunition racks. Instead there was a large steel-wire bustle for personal things, especially water. One by one, the crews cycled their vehicles through the course. The Bradley crews even got to fire a single TOW missile each. Then they entered the reloading area, taking on new ammunition to replace what had been expended on the range.
It was all quiet and businesslike. The Blackhorse, because they trained other soldiers so regularly in the fine art
1203
of mechanized death, were utterly desensitized to the routine tasks of soldiering. They had to remind themselves that this was not their desert–deserts all look pretty much alike; this one, however, didn’t have creosote bushes and coyotes. It did have camels and merchants. The Saudis honored their hospitality laws by providing food and soft drinks in abundance to the troopers, while their senior officers conferred over maps with the region’s bitter coffee.
Marion Diggs was not a big man. A cavalryman all of his life, he’d always enjoyed the ability to direct sixty tons of steel with his fingertips, to reach out and touch someone else’s vehicle at three miles’ distance. Now he was a senior commander, effectively commanding a division, but with a third of it two hundred miles to the north, and another third aboard some ships which would be running a gauntlet later this evening.
“So what are we really up against, how ready are they?” the general asked.
Satellite photos went down, and the senior American intelligence officer, based at KKMC, went through his mission brief. It took thirty terse minutes, during which Diggs stood. He was very tired of sitting.
“STORM TRACK reports minimal radio traffic,” the briefing officer, a colonel, reported. “We need to remember that they’re pretty exposed where they are, by the way.”
“I have a company moving to cover it,” a Saudi officer reported. “They should be in position by morning.”
“What’s Buffalo doing?” Diggs asked. Another map went down. The Kuwaiti dispositions looked all right to his eye. At least they were not forward-deployed. Just the screening force on the berm, he saw, with the three heavy brigades in position to counter a penetration. He knew Magruder. In fact, he knew all three of the ground-squadron commanders. If the UIR hit there first, outnumbered or not, the Blue Force would give the Red one hell of a bloody nose.
“Enemy intentions?” he inquired next.
“Unknown, sir. There are elements to this we do not understand yet. Washington has told us to expect an attack, but not why.”
1204
“What the hell?”
“Tonight or tomorrow morning for that, best I can tell you, sir,” the intel officer replied. “Oh, we have newsies assigned to us. They flew in a few hours ago. They’re in a hotel in Riyadh.”
“Marvelous.”
“In the absence of knowledge of what they plan to do. . .”
“The objective is plain, is it not?” the senior Saudi commander observed. “Our Shi’ite neighbors have all the desert they need.” He tapped the map. “There is our economic center of gravity.”
“General?” another voice asked. Diggs turned to his left.
“Colonel Eddington?”
“Center of gravity is political, not military. We might want to keep that in mind, gentlemen,” the colonel from Carolina pointed out. “If they want to go for the coastal oil fields, we’ll have a lot of strategic warning.”
“They do have us outnumbered, Nick. That does give them a certain degree of strategic flexibility. Sir, I see a lot of fuel trucks in these photos,” the American general noted.
“They stopped at the Kuwait border the last time because they were out of fuel,” the Saudi commander reminded them.
The Saudi army–actually called their National Guard–comprised five heavy brigades, almost all of it American equipment. Three were deployed south of Kuwait, with one at Ras al Khafji, site of the only invasion of the Kingdom, but right on the water, and nobody expected an attack from the sea. It was not unusual for soldiers to prepare to fight the last war, the American remembered.
For his part, Eddington remembered a quote from Napoleon. When shown a defense plan that had troops evenly spaced on the French border, he’d asked the officer if the idea was to prevent smuggling. That defensive concept had been given the patina of legitimacy by NATO’s doctrine of forward defense on the inner German border, but it had never been tested, and if there were ever
1205
a place to trade space for time, it was the Saudi desert. Ed-dington kept his mouth shut on that one. He was junior to Diggs, and the Saudis seemed quite possessive about their territory, as most people were. He and Diggs shared a look. As the 10th Cav was the theater reserve for the Kuwaitis, so the 11th would perform the same function for the Saudis. That might change when his Guardsmen mounted their tracks at Dhahran, but for the moment this deployment would have to do.
One big problem with the situation was the command relationship in place. Diggs was a one-star–one hell of a good one, Eddington knew, but just a brigadier. Had CENTCOM been able to fly over, he would have had the rank status to make firmer suggestions to the Saudis. Evidently, Colonel Magruder of the Buffalo Cav had done something like that, but Diggs’s position was just a little ticklish.
“Well, we’ll have a couple of days, anyway.” The American general turned. “Get additional recon assets in place. If those six divisions fart, I want to know what they had for dinner.”
“We’ll have Predators going up at sunset,” the intel colonel promised.