The only problem was finding out which group al-Zayani was financing; if Cole could find that out, he would be one step closer to locating whatever weapon had been stolen from the Fu Yu Shan.
He had been in touch with his old friend Ike Treyborne, and together they had hatched a plot to get Cole into a meeting with al-Zayani. It had been complicated, but they had discovered a potential business venture between Saudi National Oil and a relatively young US company called Texas Mainline Oil. Seeing the opportunity, an urgent meeting had been arranged for Chadwick to meet his opposite number to discuss numbers. Both sides thought that the meeting had been the idea of the other; the reality was that Treyborne’s men had arranged the whole thing. And because Chadwick was new to the company and had never been to Dhahran before, Cole would be able to assume his place with nobody ever the wiser.
He hadn’t even had to disguise himself too much; his own photograph had been put on the expertly forged passport, and there weren’t any photos of Chadwick on the internet that anyone could check anyway. The fight with the Korean agent had left him with broken cartilage in his nose, but he’d managed to reset it by hand and it now looked as good as new; perhaps, he thought, even straighter than before.
And so it was that Cole boarded the eleven o’clock flight to Saudi Arabia, and his meeting with the suspected terrorist financier known as Abdullah al-Zayani.
If the man knew anything at all about the cargo of the Fu Yu Shan, who had it, and what they were planning on doing with it, Cole would do everything in his power to find out.
2
Abd al-Aziz Quraishi had to force himself to keep his eyes open; horrific though the sight was, he owed it to his sacred volunteers to witness firsthand what they would have to go through.
He was in the small underground laboratory underneath the compound which was serving as the base of operations for this latest mission, being taken through the effects of the product by his team of doctors.
The screams of the victims on the other side of the glass wall — people of no consequence found on the streets or in local jails and brought to the compound by Amir al-Hazmi — were enough to turn Quraishi’s iron stomach; they were worse than anything he’d ever heard in the torture cells of the Mabahith.
Quraishi turned to the nearest doctor when — at last — there was nothing left to see behind the glass. ‘So you are satisfied you can control it for optimum effect?’
‘Yes,’ the medical professional replied. ‘It is everything you said it would be, and more. We can manipulate several variables, just as you wanted.’
‘Chance of detection?’
The doctor smiled. ‘Zero. There is no chance at all.’
Quraishi grunted in satisfaction and turned to al-Hazmi, who had also forced himself to watch the grisly spectacle. ‘Get me the martyrs,’ he said. ‘Bring them to the courtyard and I will speak to them all before they venture out on their blessed pilgrimage.’
Al-Hazmi nodded. ‘Yes sir,’ he said. ‘They will appreciate that you have come here.’
Quraishi smiled. Of course they would; he was their spiritual leader, their inspiration. It was he who would unite them with Allah, blessed as martyrs with seventy-two vestal virgins and an eternity of happiness.
As al-Hazmi ran off to gather the volunteers, Quraishi pulled out his cell phone and dialed a secure number, the call made to a man several thousand miles away.
‘I need to see you,’ Quraishi announced. ‘As soon as possible.’
Jake Navarone was nervous. Excited, but nervous. As the leader of Bravo Troop, he had just received the green light for a reconnaissance mission into North Korea.
Navarone hadn’t batted an eyelid when they had let the agent known as the Asset ‘escape’; if that’s what Treyborne wanted, then that’s what he would get. And the agent had proved his mettle in battle, which was good enough for Navarone; what other measure of a man was there?
And so while the Asset — whoever he was — had been off investigating the Jemaah Islamiyah connection, Navarone and his men had been following up on the North Korea angle.
They had started with the two men listed on the crew manifest as Xiao Tong and Yan Yanzhi — the sailors who had been taken on at Dalian. The PLA special ops officers who had been seconded to the SEAL team were of enormous use here, using their contacts back in China to quickly establish that such men did not actually exist. There was no record of them anywhere, which lent credence to the fact that they were foreign agents, possibly brought on board to help protect the mysterious cargo which was also taken aboard at Dalian.
Records at the port of Dalian indicated that the crate in question was registered to a Chinese company called Shou Zhing Electrical and apparently consisted of spare computer parts. And yet further checks by the Chinese also revealed that — like the sailors — the company didn’t actually exist at all.
The investigation — authorized by General Olsen after receiving the unofficial green light by President Abrams — had continued quickly, Commander Treyborne getting a great deal of cooperation from Chinese intelligence.
It was the Chinese who had managed to trace the arrival of the crate in Dalian as air freight from Pyongyang, and had therefore confirmed the North Korean connection.
Treyborne had been appalled that this was still not enough for full approval by the National Security Council — apparently engaging with North Korea was diplomatically very dangerous, and a formal cross-border incursion was strongly discouraged in some quarters due to the possibility of military reprisals — but the president and the chairman of the joint chiefs were both adamant in their desire to find out what had been in the crate, and what the ramifications were of its theft.
And so when deep-cover Chinese agents within the North Korean capital had managed to track the crate even further back to its point of origin — a political prison camp hidden in the remote northern mountains known only by its number, Camp 14 — Treyborne had pushed for a recon mission and finally been granted his wish.
It wasn’t entirely official — there was still plausible deniability should anything go wrong — but Jake Navarone and his men had been tasked with penetrating the security of Camp 14 and finding out what sort of weapons were being made there.
Due to the ambiguous nature of the mission’s legitimacy, back-up was thin on the ground; and yet General Olsen had promised Treyborne the use of any vehicles and equipment his men needed for the insertion and extraction, and China had agreed to the use of its much closer airfields.
Jake Navarone looked across at his men, sitting in silence as they checked their personal weapons and equipment in the back of the stealthy Black Hawk helicopter. Yes, he thought as it rose slowly into the air above the Chinese military airfield that was nestled into the foothills of the Yalu River, the narrow stretch of water which separated China from North Korea; he was nervous.
He and his men had to penetrate the most secure country in the world, find a remote and secretive prison camp with next to no intelligence on the place, make their way inside without detection, and find something that might be of use to the American government. And then they would have to extract covertly, while not engaging any enemy personnel.
Navarone sighed as he considered the mission ahead.
It was going to be one tough son of a bitch.
‘So do I take it that you can assure us that no military action is currently being taken?’ Clark Mason asked with a raised eyebrow.