He recalled the old British spy chief in the window table at White’s as the left-wing demonstrators went by. Apart from the usual snowy-haired British socialists who could never quite get over the death of Lenin, there were the British boys and girls who would one day get a mortgage and vote Conservative, and there were the torrents of students from the Third World.
‘They’ll never forgive you, dear boy,’ said the old man. ‘Never expect it and you’ll never be disappointed. Your country is a constant reproach. It is rich to their poor, strong to their weak, vigorous to their idle, enterprising to their reactionary, ingenious to their bewildered, can-do to their sit-and-wait, thrusting to their stunted.
‘It only needs one demagogue to arise to shout: “Everything the Americans have they stole from you”, and they’ll believe it. Like Shakespeare’s Caliban, their zealots stare in the mirror and roar in rage at what they see. That rage becomes hatred, the hatred needs a target. The working class of the Third World does not hate you; it is the pseudo-intellectuals. If they ever forgive you, they must indict themselves. So far their hatred lacks the weaponry. One day they will acquire that weaponry. Then you will have to fight or die. Not in tens but in tens of thousands.’
Thirty years down the line, Devereaux was sure the old Brit had got it right. After Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Aden, his country was in a new war and did not know it. The tragedy was made worse by the fact the establishment was steeped in ostriches as well.
The Jesuit had asked for the front line and got it. Now he had to do something with his command. His response was Project Peregrine. He did not intend to seek to negotiate with UBL, nor even to respond after the next strike. He intended to try to destroy his country’s enemy before that strike. In Father Xavier’s analogy, he intended to use his spear to lunge, before the knife-tip came in range. This problem was: where? Not more or less, not ‘somewhere in Afghanistan’, but ‘where’ to ten yards by ten yards, and ‘when’ to thirty minutes.
He knew a strike was coming. They all did; Dick Clarke at the White House, Tom Pickard at the Bureau headquarters in the Hoover Building, George Tenet one floor above his head at Langley. All the whispers out on the street said a ‘big one’ was in preparation. It was the where, when, what, how, they did not know, and thanks to the crazy rules forbidding them to ask nasty people, they were not likely to find out. That, plus the refusal to collate what they did have.
Paul Devereaux was so disenchanted with the whole lot of them that he had prepared his Peregrine plan and would tell no one what it was.
In his reading of tens of thousands of pages about terror in general and Al Qaeda in particular, one theme had come endlessly through the fog. The Islamist terrorists would not be satisfied with a few dead Americans from Mogadishu to Dar es Salaam. UBL would want hundreds of thousands. The prediction of the long-gone Britisher was coming true.
For those kind of figures the Al Qaeda leadership would need a technology they did not yet have but endlessly sought to acquire. Devereaux knew that in the cave complexes of Afghanistan, which were not simply holes in rocks but subterranean labyrinths including laboratories, experiments had been started with germs and gases. But they were still miles from the methods of mass-dissemination.
For Al Qaeda, as for all the terror groups in the world, there was one prize beyond rubies: fissionable material. Any one of at least a dozen killer groups would give their eye-teeth, take crazy risks, to acquire the basic element of a nuclear device.
It would never have to be an ultra-modern ‘clean’ warhead; indeed the more basic, the ‘dirtier’ in radiation terms, the better. Even at the level of their in-house scientists, the terrorists knew that enough fissionable element, jacketed within enough plastic explosive, would create enough lethal radiation over enough square miles to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable for a generation. And that would be apart from the half a million people irradiated into an early, cancerous grave.
It had been a decade and the underground war had been costly and intense. So far, the West, assisted by Moscow more recently, had won it and survived. Huge sums had been spent buying up any fragment of Uranium 235 or plutonium that came near to private sale. Entire countries, former Soviet Republics, had handed over every gram left behind by Moscow, and the local dictators, under the provisions of the Nunn-Lugar Act, had become very wealthy. But there was too much, far too much, quite simply missing.
Just after he founded his own tiny section in Counter-Terrorism at Langley, Paul Devereaux noticed two things. One was that a hundred pounds of pure, weapons-grade Uranium 235 was lodged at the secret Vinca Institute in the heart of Belgrade. As soon as Milosevic fell, the USA began to negotiate its purchase. Just a third of it, thirty-three pounds or fifteen kilograms, would be enough for one bomb.
The other thing was that a vicious Serbian gangster and intimate at the court of Milosevic wanted out, before the roof fell in. He needed ‘cover’, new papers, protection and a place to disappear to. Devereaux knew that place could never be the USA. But a banana republic . . . Devereaux cut him a deal and he cut him a price. The price was collaboration.
Before he quit Belgrade, a thumbnail-sized sample of Uranium 235 was stolen from the Vinca Institute, and the records were changed to show that a full fifteen kilograms had really gone missing.
Six months earlier, introduced by the arms dealer, Vladimir Bout, the runaway Serb had handed over his sample and documentary proof that he possessed the remaining fifteen kilos.
The sample had gone to Al Qaeda’s chemist and physicist, Abu Khabab, another highly educated and fanatical Egyptian. It had necessitated his leaving Afghanistan and quietly travelling to Iraq to secure the equipment he needed to test the sample properly.
In Iraq another nuclear programme was underway. It also sought weapons-grade Uranium 235, but was making it the slow, old-fashioned way, with calutrons like the ones used in 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The sample caused great excitement.
Just four weeks before the circulation of that damnable report compiled by a Canadian magnate concerning his long-dead grandson, word had come through that Al Qaeda would deal. Devereaux had to force himself to stay very calm.
For his killing machine, he had wanted to use an unmanned high-altitude drone called the Predator, but it had crashed just outside Afghanistan. Its wreckage was now back in the USA but the hitherto unar
med UAV was being ‘weaponized’ by the fitting of a Hellfire missile so that it could in future not only see a target from the stratosphere but blow it to bits as well.
But the conversion would take too long. Paul Devereaux revamped his plan, but he had to delay it while different weaponry was put in place. Only when they were ready could the Serb accept the invitation to journey to Peshawar, Pakistan, there to meet with Kawaheri, Atef, Zubaydah and the physicist Abu Khabab. He would carry with him fifteen kilos of uranium; but not weapons-grade. Yellowcake would do, normal reactor fuel, isotope 238, 3 per cent refined, not the needed 88 per cent.
At the crucial meeting Zoran Zilic was going to pay for all the favours he had been accorded. If he did not, he would be destroyed by a single phone call to Pakistan’s lethal and pro-Qaeda secret service, the ISI.
He would suddenly double the price and threaten to leave if his new price was not met. Devereaux was gambling there was only one man who could make that decision and he would have to be consulted.
Far away in Afghanistan, UBL would have to take that phone call. High above, rolling in space, a listener satellite linked to the National Security Agency would hear the call and pinpoint its destination to a place ten feet by ten feet.
Would the man at the Afghan end wait around? Could he contain his curiosity to learn whether he had just become the owner of enough uranium to fulfil his most deadly dreams?
Off the Baluchi coast the nuclear sub USS Columbia would open her hatches to emit a single Tomahawk cruise missile. Even as it flew it would be programmed by global positioning system (GPS) plus Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DISMAC).
Three navigational systems would guide it to that hundred-square-foot and blow the entire area containing the mobile phone to pieces, including the man waiting for his call-back from Peshawar. For Devereaux the problem was time. The moment when Zilic would have to leave for Peshawar, pausing at Ras al-Khaimah to pick up the Russian, was moving ever closer. He could not afford to let Zilic panic and withdraw on the ground that he was a hunted man and thus their deal was null and void. Avenger had to be stopped and probably destroyed. Lesser evil, greater good.
It was 20 August. A man descended from the Dutch KLM airliner straight in from Curaçao to Paramaribo airport. It was not Professor Medvers Watson, for whom a reception committee waited further down the coast.
It was not even the US diplomat, Ronald Proctor, for whom a crate waited at the docks.