“Kashani, that fuck!” Culler blurted out.
Avery shared the sentiment. He was just as surprised to hear that name come up here. The faces of dead friends and teammates appeared clear in his mind.
“Someone you know?” Slayton asked.
“Yeah,” Avery said. “You could say that.”
Avery exchanged looks with Culler, who knew exactly what Avery was thinking.
Two years ago Avery ran security for a CIA unit assigned to recover loose missiles in Libya. Gaddafi had accumulated vast stockpiles of weapons, including 20,000 SAMs, over half of which were unaccounted after the NATO-backed Libyan National Transitional Council took power.
During the chaos that followed the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, Libya became an ungoverned free-for-all. Arms depots were looted by the various terrorist groups, intelligence services, and arms merchants flocking to the country in droves. In addition to becoming a new insurgent battleground rivaling Iraq during the American occupation, Libya also became a giant arms bazaar with everything from AK-47s and RPGs to tanks, mines, artillery, chemical weapons shells, and enriched uranium for sale.
On top of Libyan arms, plenty of American weapons flooded the market too, including thousands of American-made Stinger missiles and AT-4 anti-tank rockets that the US secretary of state had convinced the president to send to Libyan rebel groups, at least one of which was a designated terrorist organization and affiliated with al-Qaeda.
And al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Shabaab, Chechen rebels, Syrian rebels, Iraqi insurgents, Egyptian spies, Sudanese generals, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard all lined up to buy everything they could get their hands on.
While NATO forces immediately locked down Libyan nuclear and chemical weapons sites, the White House tasked CIA with locating and buying or destroying the MANPADS.
So Avery’s team of shooters escorted Arabic fluent case officers through the war ravaged streets of Tripoli, the harbors of Sirte, and abandoned desert army bases turned terrorist shopping centers, following tip-offs from Arab agents recruited amongst the rebel forces and leads generated from interrogating Libyan military officers. Avery’s job was to keep the case officers alive and conduct direct action to secure any missiles they found.
After a month of snooping around, tipped off by sources belonging to Ghadaffi defectors to the National Transitional Council, Avery’s team soon caught wind of Iranians looking for Gaddafi’s brand new SA-24s.
Why would the Iranians go through the trouble of slipping undercover operatives into a war zone to procure weapons when they could simply place an order with Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, or Vietnam? Because this way there’d be no records and no way for Western agencies to track the sales and trace the missiles back from the end-user to the supplier. The missiles were a completely deniable, untraceable weapon Iran could supply to Hezbollah or Hamas.
Within the week, Avery’s team picked up the trail of the Iranians, and learned they were planning to raid a secret storage facility belonging to Gaddafi’s elite 32nd Khamis Brigade hidden beneath a farm in Tripoli’s Salahadin neighborhood.
A Libyan agent from one of the militia groups on the CIA payroll reported the Iranians had procured army transport trucks, paid off Islamists who had seized an abandoned Libyan air base, and were preparing to move the missiles out of the Salahadin facility that night. The shipment reportedly numbered in the hundreds.
The head of the CIA task force shit a brick when he heard this. He gave Avery the green light to move in and use whatever force necessary to prevent the removal of the weapons.
But Avery’s team was delayed negotiating passage through the territory of a local militia, and the team arrived too late. They searched the warehouse, finding plenty of anti-tank rockets and older Chinese-made missiles, but not a single SA-24 or SA-7. They did, however, recover SA-24 operating and maintenance manuals, spare battery-coolant units, and transit crates.
While Avery’s team remained on site and waited for the arrival of British forces to lock the place down and take inventory, they came under attack by Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist faction allied with Iran. The firefight lasted until British paratroopers arrived to even the odds, but not before Avery lost three of the men on his team.
The next day, CIA learned through one of its Libyan agents that an Iranian cargo plane had taken off just two hours later from the abandoned airfield the Iranians secured fifty miles away. The plane landed in Sudan, and the missiles were diverted to covert Iranian bases in Shiite rebel territory in Yemen.
Egyptian and Israeli intelligence sources in Sudan later identified Colonel Vahid Kashani, a man already known to CIA and Mossad, as the leader of the Iranian acquisition team.
Six months later, the Israelis raided a Hezbollah safe house in southern Lebanon and discovered a cache of five SA-24s. Since then, Libyan SAMs, both shoulder-launched and pedestal-mounted, have also turned up in the Gaza Strip, Mali, the Sinai Peninsula, Somalia, and Syria. American aircraft have already been shot down by the loose missiles, including a USAF spy plane taking off from Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and a Chinook carrying a SEAL Team Six contingent in Afghanistan.
Ever since Libya, Vahid Kashani had been on Avery’s personal hit list. Avery pushed his contacts in JSOC and CIA’s Near East Division, waiting to catch that one bit of intel that would set him on Kashani’s path or steer him toward those missing SA-24s before they ended up in the hands of insurgents targeting American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan or, worse, in the hands of terrorists inside the United States.
Avery usually had no problem keeping detached from his work, viewing it as just that, but this was different. He’d done plenty of time as a soldier, lugging around a backpack and a rifle in foreign countries, following orders. He’d also seen friends catch a bullet or an IED. Part of the reason he went to work for CIA was because he thought maybe he could stop more soldiers from getting killed in some God-awful place because one asshole or another in the White House was pressured to intervene in some conflict or another that often had little to do with the United States, more often than not in a short sighted, half ass manner.
But other than one time in southern Yemen, where Avery had Kashani under surveillance and in his crosshairs, only to be ordered by the Seventh Floor to let him go, he’d had no luck. Ironically and frustrating, it had been one of the rare times he actually listened to Langley’s orders.
Avery vowed that the next time he had Kashani in his sights, he’d pull the trigger. And it wouldn’t matter a damn to him whether he had official sanction or not.
“We knew these weapons were going to turn up somewhere. It was just a matter of time,” Culler said.
And he was right, but Avery never expected the missiles to turn up quite so close to home.
“I suppose this might be a stupid question to you spooks, but why would Iran arm FARC?” Slayton asked. He knew, inside and out, the world’s drug production centers and smuggling routes, and the governments and gangs involved, but Middle Eastern politics fell outside his areas of experience or interest.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Culler replied. As a veteran CIA operations officer, he’d come up against Iranian agents on multiple occasions in Iraq, Lebanon, Bosnia, Turkey, and even in Canada. He knew firsthand how cunning and devious they were.
“With SA-24, they possess the perfect terrorist weapon, and Iranian involvement is concealed and deniable. If FARC acquires SA-24 and can turn an important country in the American sphere of influence into a war zone and destabilize the region, well, that’ll keep the White House pre-occupied with another crisis, won’t it? And FARC takes the blame. Just look at Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, the bombings of the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, the attack on the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan. Iran’s preferred method of attack is through deniable terrorist proxies.”