Rodriguez sighed.
“Maybe you’re right. Take us down from periscope depth, return us to a trail position on Sierra-eleven, and designate Sierra-eleven as the Hamza.”
CHAPTER 28
Olivia buried herself in her laptop and pieced together the history of Hamid Hayat. She hypothesized that he intended to use nuclear weapons to attack the Indian fleet with the support of a fundamentalist Islamic group that the Pakistani intelligence group, ISI, had identified as HUM, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Find a reason why he’d do it, she thought. What does he gain by attacking? What does HUM gain?
She started by reconstructing Hayat.
He had been born in the Northwest Frontier Province, a Pakistani province with a majority government controlled by the hardline Islamic political party, United Action Forum. The youngest of five children, he had seen his two brothers recruited to support the Afghan freedom fighters during the Soviet invasion.
Hayat was thirteen years old when his father had sent him to live with his aunt and her husband in Karachi. Olivia’s guess coincided with that of Pakistani ISI intelligence that the father, a man of frail health who had later passed away from an undocumented illness, had moved Hayat far from the soviet danger to ensure he survived.
Deeper digging into the dossier showed that Hayat had lost the younger brother in battle. The oldest brother, a devout religious man and a likely head of the house due to the ailing father, had joined the fighters and developed a following. Over the next two decades, he had risen to become a high-ranking cleric in the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Olivia recognized the names of Taliban and Al-Quaeda figures with whom the older brother associated.
There’s the link between Hayat and HUM, she thought.
Despite the fraternal link, the dossier showed a schism between Hayat and HUM. Hayat was educated in a secular system. Growing up outside its walls, he had applied for entrance to the Pakistani Naval Academy.
Already sensing a shift in the early nineties against military leaders with ties to religion, Hayat had lied on his application and had claimed his uncle as his father. Not until the ISI investigation into the Hamza’s rogue status did officials uncover this lie.
His family name wasn’t Hayat. Commander Hamid Hayat had taken his uncle’s last name to sever ties with his family’s fundamentalist roots and to seek a naval career.
That must have pissed off big brother, Olivia thought.
He entered the Pakistani Naval Academy and graduated third in his class. Earning two B’s in English while catching up for the weaker schooling of his hometown, he could not catch two straight-A students, but he nonetheless displayed brilliance in his studies.
Performance grades at the academy and early fitness reports after his commissioning suggested he would make an insightful tactician and leader. He had been groomed for command since first donning the white uniform.
He had been ranked as the top junior officer during his tours of duty on a Daphne class submarine and an earlier Agosta. Before his executive officer tour on the Khalid, the first of the next-generation French-built Agosta 90B submarines, reform had shaped his career.
In the late nineties, the military had made decisive moves to root out hardline Islamic influence. Officers with association to extremist groups had been retired or otherwise forced out.
While watching his government flip-flop between Bhutto and Sharif’s corrupt Prime Ministries, Hayat lived during a time when the military provided the bedrock for the nation. He must have embraced secular rule as the foundation for the navy, his personal advancement within it, and his nation’s stability.
As one of the military’s hopefuls, he had been sent to study at the United States Naval Submarine School. Records from the school showed a curriculum of basics, but fitness reports from Hayat’s executive officer tour noted he had used American principles to redefine combat tactics for the Agosta 90B class. His tactics had become the official doctrine for the Pakistani fleet.
Already selected to command the first Agosta 90B to be assembled in Pakistan, he found a new opportunity for advancement at the end of his executive officer tour. In the post-9/11 world, Pakistan needed to nurture every diplomatic tie with the United States.
The diplomatic gesture of sending the future commander of the young nuclear state’s top war machine, the pre-commission unit Hamza, to study public policy from America’s top institution sent the message that the Pakistani military remained committed to secular control of itself and the country. President Musharraf himself had signed the recommendation requesting Hayat’s admittance to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Olivia rocked back on her chair and rubbed her eyes. Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” she said.
A tall Taiwanese sailor with minimal English skills, a junior galley mate, nodded, ducked into the room, and grabbed the dinner plate she had nibbled down to chicken bones.
When the galley mate left, Olivia stood and paced the five feet of clear space she had in her room. After her blood flow improved, she recommenced her studies.
Finding it impossible to dive into all of his work in one night, she scanned what looked like a collection of Hayat’s assignments at Harvard. Two facts struck her. The first, his graduation with top honors. The second, perhaps even more impressive, President Musharraf’s request to review Hayat’s master’s thesis. Olivia decided she would read the thesis when time permitted, but racing for a quick snapshot of his mindset, she scanned it.
The title stood out.
Protecting Legitimate Governments from Asymmetric Warfare through Naval Power.
She flipped through the document Hayat had written three years earlier. Although the words “terrorist” or “terrorism” never appeared in the document, the thesis was his manual for a joint Pakistani-American naval effort to contain terrorists. Instead of calling them terrorists, he used an alternative term that Olivia found demeaning and arrogant as she absorbed the bitter tone of the thesis.
Those of simple fundamentalist mind.
Hayat pointed out how extremist groups could use the seas to pose threats to coastal cities, ports, and shipping. The thesis analyzed target selection, funding, planning, coordination and implementation of the attack, and post-attack propaganda to recruit new members. He viewed it as a cycle where leaders chose new targets as manifestations of jihad for the new recruits.
He concluded with a chapter on breaking that cycle. Given his slant on maritime threats, he focused on target identification and on coordination and implementation of the attack as points where naval forces could break the cycle and thwart the efforts of simple fundamentalist minds.
Simple fundamentalist mind. Olivia noted repeated use of the term and sensed by the tone of the thesis that he held a grudge against the uneducated and arduous life he had escaped by moving to Karachi — the life that had ruptured his family.
Common practices he recommended for American and Pakistani navies were more small arms-trained personnel on naval and key merchant vessels. He noted that the Cold War model of big guns and cruise missiles failed to protect the modern warship against small boats swarms and swimmers. It needed rocket-propelled grenades, fifty-caliber machine guns, and even teams of armed divers while in port to make warfare less asymmetric — to fight fire with fire.
Interesting insight from a submarine officer, she thought. But not relevant to me right now.