He was surrounded, as always, by a dozen girls, most of them from Japan, most of them barely in their teens. A pot of calming tea was steaming on a table nearby. The remains of some small biscuits littered the tea tray. The room was filled with the stench of plum incense. A bank of computer screens glowed at one end of the room. They were filled with the latest financial information from Zurich, Paris, London, New York.
Zim clapped his hands, and one of the young Japanese girls crawled up the hill of pillows and knelt before him. He raised his right eyebrow a bit—the girl knew what this meant right away. She reached up, took off his thick-rimmed glasses, wiped a speck of dust from the right lens, and returned them to Zim’s nose. Then she slipped back down to the floor.
Zim was reading a piece on the fluctuating uranium market, and was thinking about organizing a coup in the Ivory Coast that would bring him closer to the uranium fields at Daloa, when the door at the far end of his chamber opened.
Two heavily armed men stepped in. Dressed all in black, they bowed and made way for a third person. This man came in on his knees, inching forward a little bit at a time. He was one of Zim’s legion of flunkies, glorified servants who ran errands and carried messages for him from the various parts of his palace. They were all required to enter into his presence this way.
The man had made it about fifteen feet inside the room when Zim finally shouted at him: “OK, get up, you ass!”
The man immediately obeyed and began tiptoeing across the room toward the mountain of pillows. The Japanese girls made way for him as, with trembling hand, he proffered a note on a silver tray up to Zim.
On a signal from Zim, one girl took the note, climbed up the pillows, and presented it to him with a long deep bow.
Zim put his magazine aside, adjusted his thick glasses, and opened the note.
A hush came over the room. This was not considered pleasant news, and the man who had delivered it was in desperate fear of his life at the moment. It was not unknown for Zim to kill the messenger when the news was bad.
Zim read the note silently. He seemed confused at first—again not a good sign.
“Who sent this?” he asked.
The man at the base of the pillows quavered a bit.
“Your guest in Room Six,” he replied with a shaky voice. “He’s been on the phone all night.”
Zim considered this, then reread the note.
“Is he being intentionally vague?” he asked the messenger.
“I have no idea, sir,” the man replied, his voice equal parts terror and confusion. “Shall I go back and ask him?”
Zim shook his head. “No, I think I know what he means.”
He crumpled the note and threw it down on the mountain of pillows. Then he put his hand to his chin in thought.
“Tell Major Qank to activate the Third Ring,” he told the messenger. “He is to report to me anything unusual that those in the Ring might see. Understand?”
“I do,” the man replied, backing up slowly. If he could just get out of the door alive, it would be a major victory.
“And one more thing,” Zim called after him. “Thank my guest in Room 6.”
“I will, sir,” the man said, disappearing back out the door.
Once he was gone, Zim yawned, stretched his enormous body, and then put his head on a pillow and went to sleep. This was a normal ritual for him at about 9 A.M. every day.
Only when they heard him snoring did one of the Japanese girls retrieve the crumpled-up note and carry it over to the others who were waiting in the corner.
Quietly, they opened it and read it.
It contained only two words: They’re coming.
Major Ali Bus Qank was not really a major. Nor was he a military officer of any kind.
He was, however, the man in charge of Zim’s intelligence operation, and for this Zim had conferred the rank of “major” upon him arbitrarily. For all the work Qank wound up doing, he secretly believed he deserved to be given at least the faux rank of colonel—yet he would never tell Zim this.
Qank was a Syrian. He worked out of an office located beneath the west wall of Zim’s inner sanctum. From there Qank and a team of four collected intelligence from a variety of sources—newspapers, TV broadcasts, the Internet—as well as from the network of informants Zim had in place around the world.
This network was broken down into sectors known as Rings. Zim had organized the network himself many years before, and it was brilliant in its simplicity. The Third Ring was made up of freelance spies who had access to all airports, both commercial and military, as well as all major shipping ports stretching across southern Europe to the Middle East. Through simple observation, intercepted radio traffic, and purloined passage logs, the Third Ring knew just about every airplane and surface vessel, military or not, that moved from America through Europe to the Middle East.
Of the entire network, the Third Ring was the most reliable at revealing the American military’s objectives. Like Zim, Qank knew some things about the Americans. First, they always entered military action reluctantly. Yet when they made their minds up to act, they usually acted quickly. Too quickly, most times, especially when it came to secret operations.
That was what Qank knew Zim was now anticipating. The sinking of the USS LaSallette had been a big mistake. But mistakes happen. The destruction of the Qak-Six oil rig had been a job, paid for by a rival oil consortium, just one of dozens Zim had contracted for the gunship in the past year and a half. That the star-crossed American ship had happened upon the scene was something that could not have been prevented. And actually, there had been some luck in this. Because the LaSallette was a spy ship, there had been nothing heard about its sinking—not in the media, not in the back channels. Not yet anyway. Qank knew the Americans would want to keep quiet for now about the ship’s sinking, rather than admit what it was up to at the time of its demise.
But Qank also knew the Americans could not let the sinking go unpunished. Refugee camps, food convoys, Bosnian innocents—their liquidation had registered little on America’s moral radar. But the sinking of the LaSallette had changed that. Some of their own had been killed—by a weapon they had lost control of many years before. And now the Americans were coming to get that weapon back. Finally.
Qank and Zim had discussed this eventuality before, of course. In their scenario, they expected at least a thousand American troops, probably special forces of some kind, to transit to the Persian Gulf area, probably offloading in Bahrain or in the United Arab Emigrates, but definitely not in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. The prepositioning of this force would likely be accompanied by the appearance of an aircraft carrier or two moving into the upper Gulf area. Then all U.S. forces in the area would be put on alert—and then the Americans would strike.
The only question was, when?
That was where the Third Ring came in. If anyone could identify the means of transport and the timetable of the oncoming American force, the freelance spies in the Third Ring could.
So Qank worked his secure phones for the rest of this day and far into the night. Giving orders to his informants and getting back their reports, he spoke to more than 150 individuals in eighteen hours. If a thousand special troops were moving to the Persian Gulf area by air, Zim’s spies would have detected a small parade of C-5 or C-17 cargo planes making their way across the Atlantic. These planes might land at Rota, Spain, or on Sardinia. (Nonstop transits were not common, if only to preserve the crews and prevent suspicion.) If such a force was moving by ship, the spies would likely see a fast-assault vessel or even a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier suddenly make an appearance in their region.