The Socotra Incident (3 page)

The office had deep carpets; a Persian rug of exquisite detail lay under a massive desk that barely allowed passage around it. Computer screens glowed behind a high-backed ostrich-skin swivel chair. The occupant was turned away from Natalie; a phone line ran from a receiver around the chair.

“I swear to God, Marco, if you don’t have that shipment in Naples by this time tomorrow, I will pop your nuts in a vice and use your falsetto voice as my new ringtone!” said a woman’s voice from the chair. “Oh, you
can
have it delivered on time? That’s what I thought. Don’t make me call you back.”

The chair swung around. The woman’s features told of mixed Asian and Caucasian heritage; a few strands of gray hair ran from her brow into long black hair with subtle waves. She wore a white blouse and had a gold-and-diamond necklace that must have cost more than Natalie had ever made during her entire four years in the army.

The strangest thing about the woman was that Natalie instantly recognized her.

“Italians. It’s always ‘
demani
demani’
but tomorrow never comes with these people.” The seated woman said.

“I-I know you. You’re from USAID. Genevieve? Genevieve Delacriox?” Natalie asked.

The woman rolled her eyes. “You don’t even bat an eye at Carlos who you’d seen in Iraq and was the man that picked up your bag. Or Mike, your diver, who snatched a detainee right from under your nose at a detention center in Iraq. But
me
you recognize right away. Call me Shannon from now on.”

Natalie stared at Shannon/Genevieve, and suddenly a series of events from her deployment to Iraq made sense. The CIA had been lurking around her unit from the time two Soldiers were kidnapped by al Qaeda to the moment Eric Ritter had vanished from the face of the earth.

“Please”—Shannon motioned to a chair across from her—“before you fall down.”

Natalie accepted the invitation. The leather of the chair was supple and thick beneath her touch.

“Camel leather, latest craze among Gulf Arabs. They found another use for those stink beasts besides racing and milk. You like it?”

Natalie just kept staring at her, still dumbfounded.

Shannon folded her hands on the desk.

“Let’s get a few things out of the way. Yes, I used USAID as cover while I was in Iraq. I went with you to that little army base in the middle of Iraq terrorist country to check up on Eric Ritter, who was working with us to recover the two Soldiers kidnapped by al-Qaeda. You caught our eye, and we approached you after your deployment. You did very well in training, and now you’re here for evaluation.”

Natalie managed to nod while her mind raced. She knew Ritter had gone well beyond the limits of what an officer in the US Army could do to find the two missing Soldiers. Natalie had accepted those means only because they had led to that patch of desert where the Soldiers were buried.

Were Shannon and this organization still playing by those rules? Were murder, torture, and deceit the rules of Shannon’s game?

“So what do you think we do here?” Shannon asked.

Natalie worked her jaw from side to side, a horrible clue alerting anyone paying attention that she was nervous.

“If we’d met like this in Iraq, I would have said counterterrorism. But now…I doubt there are many al-Qaeda cells in Vienna,” Natalie said.

“We still have a counterterrorism mission, just at a higher level than what you glimpsed in Iraq. What does any terrorist need to function?”

“Money…and a populace to hide in,” Natalie answered.

“Very good. As gratifying as it is to shoot a Hellfire missile into some
jihadi’s
face, that won’t win the long war. We’re here for their money and, by immediate extension, their weapons.”

“How does a shipping company”—Natalie looked around—“do that?”

Shannon smiled and leaned back in her chair, a predatory smile on her face. “Now you’re asking the right questions. Russians, my dear, Russians. The best retirement plan for a Russian officer is to ‘lose’ a shipment of rifles, explosives, IED components. There are other players in the arms black market, but our focus is on Soviet-era surplus.

“A shipping company is good cover for interacting with the sellers and the buyers. We have operations on the buy side of the equation, but that doesn’t concern you just yet.”

“That’s why I had to spend five hours a day, six days a week, learning Russian on top of my field training?” Natalie asked.

“Yes. Your instructor rates your Russian is passable,” Shannon said. “With enough practice we’ll get you to a near native level.”

Natalie swallowed hard. Passable? She could keep up a half hour long conversation over the finer points of Lermontov’s fiction and her instructor rated her as “passable?” She’d display her mastery of Moscow slang and insults the next time she saw the bloated potato-headed bore of a man that taught her the language of the Czars.

She choked down her anger and focused on the task at hand. Might as well get her other concerns out of the way before she went too far down the rabbit hole to turn back.

“How do we…do this? The schoolhouse beat us over the head with plenty of what we
can’t
do. Things that Ritter and, I guess, you, did in Iraq.”

“We do what we must, Natalie. If it comes to morality or saving lives, we choose to save lives. If something makes you uncomfortable, say the word, and you can leave.”

Natalie said nothing.

Shannon leaned forward in her chair to make her eyes level with Natalie’s.

“This is important: We do not exist, as far as Washington knows. No Congressional oversight, no inquisition from an inspector general’s office demanding to see our receipts for coffee creamer. We’re expected to deliver results, not good feelings.”

“That’s not how I was trained,” Natalie said, her voice meek. She’s learned her fair share of dirty tricks, and her instructors had soothed her concerns by specifying how everything she’d be asked to do was legal under the laws of the United States. Other countries, not so much.

“It’s quite liberating once you get used to it. So, ready to get to work?”

“What do I do first?”

“Lunch. You and I have a business lunch two days from now. In the meantime, a car will take you to your apartment. Get over your jet lag and buy some suitably expensive clothes. Our concierge has your appointment at the Kohlmarkt department store set up; they’ll pick you up at ten.” Shannon stood up and leaned over her desk to look at Natalie’s feet.

“See Mario for shoes. He’s incredible.”

“Wait. I thought I’d get fired for overbilling a cup of coffee. How the hell does Uncle Sam afford”—she held her genuine purse—“this?”

“There you go, asking the right questions again.” Shannon winked at her. “Go. I have to threaten to castrate a Greek over a cargo of wheat rotting on a pier in Alexandria.”

Natalie stood up and turned away. She stopped a step away from the door and looked over her shoulder.

“Where’s Ritter? Is he here?” Natalie felt like some lovesick school girl asking the questions and immediately regretted them.

“I’ve got him out of town, running an errand.”

Aden.

Ritter hated the Yemeni city. He hated the sketchy border town atmosphere, borne from centuries as a nexus for shipping, piracy, and smuggling on the eponymous gulf. He hated the air, which was fat with humidity in the 100-degree temperature. Hated the memories the city held.

He’d been here on the day a terrorist attack hit the
USS Cole
. A college trip to appreciate the old city, built into the depression of an extinct volcano, had taken a bitter turn when the snap of five hundred pounds of high explosives rolled over the city that early October morning.

What he hated most about Aden was the way the city had cheered after the attack. He’d never wanted to return to the sweltering cesspit of a city. His target, an al-Qaeda courier, was here, and Ritter’s choice of travel destinations was moot.

He sat at a café, sipping what passed for coffee in this part of the Arab world: a light-colored roast that smelled of cinnamon and cardamom, and tasted of the sesame seeds coating the bottom of the cup. As much as he disliked the city, at least the coffee was drinkable. He shuffled his newspaper and stared over the top of the page at the Internet café across the street.

The courier was the cousin—and therefore a trusted agent—of a Saudi prince the CIA suspected was funding al-Qaeda with money skimmed from charities and the prince’s construction interests in Oman. The Saudis had a good reputation for arranging sudden and fatal accidents for any royals linked to al-Qaeda, but they demanded solid proof before acting.

“Nothing from the rear exit,” a voice crackled from a tiny earpiece. “You still have the eye.”

Ritter clicked his tongue twice to acknowledge the message. The other operative, who went by John for this mission, was on loan from the CIA station in the capitol city of Sana’a, had done a decent job of keeping a low profile and swapping out the “eye,” the designation for whoever had active sight on their target. John had had the eye until the courier went into the Internet café; then Ritter had picked it up so John could transition to watch the back.

The conversation in the café turned to swapping dirty jokes about the Huthis, Shia Muslims who lived on the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Ritter smiled and laughed along, not caring for the crass humor, but one had to maintain appearances. He wore a white
thawb
, a calf-length tunic his Soldiers in Iraq had dubbed a “man dress,” and a dark-blue vest. With his deep tan, three-day beard, and gold-rimmed sunglasses, he almost fit in. His Arabic had a Saudi accent, which matched his cover story of working for a Saudi import/export, a subsidiary of Eisen Meer Logistics.

Red and blue lights flashed in the corner of Ritter’s eye. He and the rest of those in the café looked around and watched as three blue-and-white police trucks tore past the café. The truck beds were packed with uniformed police, who leaped from the trucks before they could stop. The police, AK-47s in hand, swarmed around the Internet café but didn’t go inside.

“Cops, cops, cops,” Ritter murmured for John as the patrons in the café rushed to the windows for a better look at the show.

Shouts in Arabic hit Ritter through the earpiece loud enough to make him wince. The transmission cut off a second later, and Ritter watched as the police frog-marched a cuffed and hooded John into a police truck.

There wasn’t any use in playing hero to rescue John. He had diplomatic immunity, and whatever “misunderstanding” had led to his arrest would be cleared up in the next few hours. None of the police seemed interested in him, which meant only John had been compromised.

He hadn’t wanted to involve the local CIA support element. Shannon had sent him on this errand alone, and the station chief had insisted his officer could operate without a tail. So much for that idea.

Ritter had more pressing concerns.

The door to the Internet café opened, and Ritter saw the mark push his way past the crowd growing around the cordon. The man, in his early twenties, wore a
janbiya
, a wide-bladed, curved knife sheathed in a cloth belt at his waist; and a black-and-white keffiyeh cloth headdress. The mark walked stiffly and kept looking over his shoulder at the Internet café. Men and a few women cloaked in niqab, only their eyes visible beneath the flowing black cloth, walked along a street crowded with white vans and beat-up trucks.

The typical disorder of the Arab world was something Ritter had never grown accustomed to. Cars and trucks were parked at strange angles to the curbside. Speed limits were a joke, and drivers used their horns as often as the brake pedal.

He couldn’t wait for this surveillance mission to end and return to Vienna. The Germanic people followed the rules like it was their religion.

Ritter peeled a few bills from a roll of Yemeni rials and left them on the table. He waited for the mark to look away, then stepped over the waist-high fence next to his table. Ritter increased his stride and gained on the mark.

With no backup and in a city full of al-Qaeda sympathizers, his options with the mark were limited. Ritter closed the distance to ten feet and saw an opportunity—an alleyway just ahead of the mark. The goon play might work. Shove him into the alley and demand restitution for an unpaid debt, rough him up and lift whatever he was carrying.

The mark stopped at a stall of folks selling batches of khat
wrapped in banana leaves. The seller, a stick of khat sticking from the corner of his mouth, asked the mark a few questions. Ritter heard the seller repeat himself in different Arabic dialects for the benefit of his potential customer, but the mark stood stock still, his shoulders bunched high with stress.

Ritter looked past the mark; the route into the alleyway was clear.

He was a few steps from the mark when he saw what the mark was looking at. In the reflection from a storefront window, the mark was looking right at Ritter, and he had his hand on the hilt of his
janbiya
.

When wielding a big, heavy blade like a
janbiya
, amateurs tend to put too much swing into their strikes. Ritter took a quick step back and almost avoided the blade as the mark swung it around in a straight-arm swing. The curved edge grazed Ritter’s vest and swept past him.