Jim Yancy watched the limousine pull up to the main airport entrance, coming to a smooth stop right outside the door. The trunk was popped open and the bags whisked away even before the passenger had been let out by the uniformed driver.
It was definitely him — Dan Chadwick of Texas Mainline Oil.
Right on time.
Yancy nodded at the man opposite him, who held up the hypodermic needle and nodded back.
He then checked out of the van’s blackened windows once more, turned to the man next to him and nodded again.
The van’s side door was immediately slid open, and Yancy burst into action.
Chadwick watched as assistants came to take care of his bags, and started to move slowly towards the electrically sliding doors of the airport terminal.
He was still thinking about that dry martini when everything changed.
The first thing he heard was the noise of a vehicle pulling up behind him; then a door sliding open; and then the he felt arms reaching out for him, a sharp stabbing sensation in the side of his neck; and then there was nothing at all.
Lt. Commander Nelson Iboria nodded to Lieutenant Yancy, who held the unconscious body of Dan Chadwick, and banged hard on the partition to the van’s cabin, alerting the driver. The van pulled away immediately, heading for the airport exit.
From Chadwick stepping out of the limousine, to being drugged and unconscious in the moving van, had taken no longer than four seconds — a short enough period of time for any witnesses to doubt the possibility of what they had seen. It had been like a magician’s illusion, a trick which nobody would be able to fathom. And now Chadwick was safely in the van, the next part of the plan could commence.
The operation had been planned by Commander Treyborne with incredible speed, but time was definitely of the essence and Iboria was just glad that he’d got to play a part in it. After all, it wasn’t strictly speaking an authorized mission.
But, as Treyborne had explained to all the men, it was absolutely vital to American interests that Chadwick be intercepted at the airport; and that was good enough for Iboria. Let the politicians play their little games in their ivory towers, but when there was work to be done, Iboria was the man to do it.
And — authorized or not — Dan Chadwick of Texas Mainline Oil was now in the custody of SEAL Team Six.
Mark Cole strolled through the gates of Dallas/Fort Worth International, his passport bearing up to the scrutiny of two independent sets of airline security.
He was now travelling as Daniel Jordan Chadwick of Dallas, Texas; the real man would soon be comfortably ensconced in the nearby Hyatt Regency for the duration of the operation, courtesy of Commander Treyborne’s Red Squadron SEALs.
Back in Sumatra, Treyborne had been all set to arrest Cole; but when Cole had told him who he really was, Treyborne’s old friend Mark Kowalski, the SEAL commander had been so surprised that he had listened to Cole’s entire story — his recruitment into the SRG, his time in prison, his rescue by Charles Hansard and his new identity.
Treyborne had known Cole was on the level; after all, he’d been the best man the commander had ever worked with. And so he had continued to listen as Cole explained what they needed to do.
It was clear that the hijacking wasn’t all it seemed, but it was also equally — and unfortunately — true that certain people at the White House didn’t want to know about it, and would make any further operations difficult to get off the ground. Plans probably would get made, but not rapidly enough to deal with the situation effectively.
Cole’s name was muddied by the accusations, and — despite the safe retrieval of the Fu Yu Shan and its crew — anything he said was going to be regarded as tainted. In fact, it seemed that some elements on the National Security Council were questioning how Cole had managed to find the pirate lair in the first place, insinuating that perhaps he was involved in the enterprise somehow himself.
But no matter what the politicians said, Cole was happy that Treyborne still trusted him. The SEAL commander believed what his old colleague told him about Arief Suprapto’s information, and — to Cole’s delight — was willing to stand by what he’d told President Abrams; the leads to both Jemaah Islamiyah and North Korea should be followed up.
Cole knew that the NSC would be slow to follow up on the first; after all, the only evidence to link the hijacking to Jemaah Islamiyah had been Suprapto, who was now dead. And so Cole had suggested that he follow up the lead himself; he could do so quickly, and such undercover work was his specialty.
The connection to North Korea was easier to sell to the men higher up the chain, and Treyborne had managed to convince first Scott Murphy, the DEVGRU commander, then General Cooper, and finally General Olsen, that he should be allowed to assign some of his men to an investigation.
And so — to both Cole and Treyborne’s immense relief — DEVGRU’s Red Squadron had received unofficial authorization from General Olsen to follow-up on the leads stemming from the container which had been taken on at Dalian, and the two mysterious sailors who had boarded with it.
But for Cole to pursue the leads to Jemaah Islamiyah, he was going to have to avoid being arrested by the SEALs; and it had therefore been agreed that he would manage to ‘escape’ the island and go on the run.
Cole was immensely grateful to Treyborne; he knew any help he received with this part of the mission — such as the abduction of the real Dan Chadwick — would be completely unauthorized, and potentially illegal. It was a big ask, but Treyborne was a patriot first and foremost, and understood that something big was about to happen; and if he could help, then he would, and hang the consequences.
And so Cole had ‘fought’ his way off the small island and escaped the SEALs who were supposed to arrest him.
He had immediately started making his enquiries, checking out local airports and downloading flight plans and logs while also scouring intelligence databases around the world for information on Umar Shibab, Suprapto’s alleged Jemaah Islamiyah contact.
And it was the confluence of these two factors which had led him to Abdullah al-Zayani and Saudi National Oil, and his current task of impersonating Dan Chadwick.
Decryption and translation of Shibab’s recent emails by the NSA showed several messages regarding financial transactions between Shibab and Dhahran Mainframes, an engineering subsidiary of Saudi National Oil. And at the same time, Cole’s research into recent flights from the Sumatran mainland to places of interest revealed that a private jet had left Kuala Namu International Airport, in nearby Medan, for Saudi Arabia just two days after the Fu Yu Shan had been hijacked. And what was especially interesting about the plane was that it was registered to the Orex Chemical Company which — like Dhahran Mainframes — was also a subsidiary of Saudi National Oil.
Further digging revealed that — after all the cut-outs — the man who’d signed off both the transactions through Dhahran Mainframes and the private flight by the plane owned by the Orex Chemical Company was Abdullah al-Zayani, Senior Vice President of Finance, Strategy and Development at Saudi National Oil.
Cole immediately realized that this al-Zayani could potentially be a chief financier of terrorism; perhaps embezzling funds from the fabulously wealthy oil company to fund an extremist group of some kind or another. After all, when a company was valued at over a trillion dollars, and made a further billion dollars every single day, who was going to miss a measly twenty million here or there? And the Senior Vice President of Finance, Strategy and Development was the perfect man to siphon off funds and make sure the crime was never discovered.