“God rest her soul,” Dominic said softly.
Jack looked out the window at the cloud layer below. “That’s on us. Our fault. They killed her because we got involved.”
Chavez sighed. “Incomplete intelligence, Jack. We were the tip of the spear, but the shaft of the spear let us down. If we knew more, if we had more time, we could have done something that—”
Jack replied flatly, “Yeah, but the shaft of the spear didn’t get her killed. We did.”
Chavez said, “Mary Pat said there is some kind of breach they can’t wrap their heads around. This looks like part of that. That woman was dead the second CIA found out the DPRK was going to get documents from the USA.”
“Fuck!” Jack said, slamming the table in front of him.
Chavez left the younger men with their thoughts, and went back up to Kincaid. The man was still their prisoner, and he was just distraught enough to try something crazy if a very sympathetic, but also very capable, man was not standing close by for the rest of the long flight back to D.C.
They had another thirteen hours of this flight, and he doubted there would be much talk out of any one of them the entire way.
After a refueling stop in Mexico City that turned into a twenty-four-hour delay due to bad weather, the old Antonov carrying Abu Musa al-Matari, his two subordinates, and a massive supply of ordnance landed at Ardmore Downtown Executive Airport, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, at two-twenty a.m. A single customs agent had been waiting for the aircraft, and only a single controller in the tower was working to bring this NAFTA flight in from South America.
The paperwork and forms had been filed in advance, the cargo had been listed as a return of defective farming machinery, and all there was for the customs agent to do was board the aircraft, check over the documentation of the crew, along with their personal passports, and conduct a quick inspection of the cargo.
The controller in the tower, the customs inspector, a refueling team at the fixed-base operator, and a single security guard in a patrol car far on the other side of the tarmac were the only people on airport grounds other than two vehicles here to meet the plane.
The An-32 did not have enough fuel to make it back to South America, but the refuelers were pumping gas before the stairs dropped from the hatch of the aircraft.
A twenty-six-foot U-Haul truck waiting for the arrival of the turboprop pulled forward, just aft of the aircraft. A Ford Explorer stopped right next to the U-Haul. One woman and five men climbed out of the vehicles and headed for the cargo hatch.
The customs inspector climbed aboard and immediately encountered the pilot and copilot standing in the front galley. He shook hands with the men, handed over their signed paperwork, verifying the cargo was indeed as represented on the manifest, and that the documentation of the two pilots was in order.
He never looked at the cargo, so he saw no rocket launchers or rifles or suicide vests, and he never looked inside the rear galley, so he did not see the three Islamic State operatives sitting there fingering Glock 17s on their hips.
An envelope containing $25,000 was handed over to the customs inspector, and he took it before quickly descending the stairs. He did not even look at the half-dozen or so people unloading fifty-pound crates from the cargo hold into a U-Haul truck.
He really did not want to know what was going on.
By four a.m. the Russian-built and Bolivian-owned Antonov was on its takeoff roll back into the morning sky; the entire Chicago cell, plus Tripoli, Algiers, and Musa al-Matari, was leaving the city of Ardmore in the two vehicles, and two tons of deadly equipment had made its way safely into the United States.
The vehicles weren’t heading for Chicago. No, now they began a long cross-country road trip that would take them several days. They had to distribute equipment to the other four teams, and it was determined this could be most safely done by driving the goods to cities within a few hours’ drive of each cell, renting storage units, and simply dropping off the crates. Then the keys would be FedExed to the leaders of the cells.
By midafternoon the truck had dropped a dozen crates in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by noon of the following day, a ten-by-ten-foot storage unit in Richmond, Virginia, had a dozen black plastic crates stacked inside. They delivered more crates to Ann Arbor, dropped their own crates in Naperville, Illinois, and here al-Matari, Algiers, and Tripoli left the group and set off for a safe house rented in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.
The Chicago cell continued on to San Francisco to deliver the last of the weaponry to the Santa Clara cell.
Al-Matari had been given a driver’s license owned by a bearded and bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old American citizen of Palestinian descent, and he had to agree that when he grew his facial hair out this man could be his doppelgänger. With this and credit cards in the man’s name, he could go where he liked, and his two Islamic State operatives could do the same with their own documentation, not that they actually expected the American police to pull them over.
They had worked behind the lines many times in their careers, and they had lived in Europe long enough to pass themselves off as Westerners, in attitude, if not in looks. They’d do their best to stay away from the authorities, but if they were questioned, their legends were backstopped and there were others here in the country who could vouch for them.
Al-Matari had worked too hard to leave anything to chance. When it became time for his men and women to begin their attacks, he would be prepared, and no random encounter by a cop was going to derail his plan.
20
The meeting in the Oval Office wasn’t on the books, but President Jack Ryan received a call at six a.m. from Chief of Staff Arnie Van Damm telling him that Mary Pat Foley, Jay Canfield, Dan Murray, and Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess would like to speak with him as soon as he could be made available. When he got the call he was eating breakfast with Cathy; she had to leave early for a surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and he was flying out that afternoon to California to survey the ongoing devastation wrought by a series of wildfires.
His two youngest children, Katie and Kyle, were both in high school, which meant they were still sound asleep, and would remain so until well past the time their alarms told them to get up and get ready.
Ryan told Arnie he’d meet with his advisers at seven a.m. if they could all make it. This was basically his entire national security staff, and he hadn’t seen anything on CNN that told him for sure what they’d want to talk about, so he was extra-curious.
He was also extra-experienced, and his experience told him the news he’d get in an hour was not going to be good.
Fifteen minutes after the meeting began, Ryan held his head in his hands, his elbows on his desk. Across from him, Mary Pat Foley, Dan Murray, and Jay Canfield had just personally delivered the news about Jakarta and the fallout of the operation.
After a long delay, he looked back up to them. “Obviously her husband knows she’s dead. Any other family?”
Canfield said, “Both parents are deceased. No children. Ben and Jen were both looking forward to returning to the USA, both getting posted to D.C., and starting a family here. We would have pulled Jen out in another ninety days or so, and she would have been done with covert work after that.”
“Why didn’t Ben Kincaid come to us from the start? The minute he was threatened with the intel?”
Murray said, “Haven’t spoken with him yet, the private flight that brought him back just landed at Reagan. But I’ve done enough of these counterintelligence espionage cases to make an educated guess as to why. He was scared. He probably thought the more dangerous course of action was informing on the people threatening him and running the risk the Koreans would go through with their promise to have his wife killed. He knew the Koreans had his wife over the barrel and they passed themselves off, and passed their needs off, as relatively benign. They just wanted some low-level classified material, and he thought he could hand that over and get his wife out of danger in the short term.”