Damascus Station Read online

  Alloush gestured Abu Qasim to sit. They ate quickly and in silence. When he’d eaten his fill, Abu Qasim sat savoring the feeling of a full belly. Finally he broke the silence. “We have an offer for you.”

  Alloush scratched at his pant leg and smiled. “The emir said this, but what does it mean? My battalions are more than capable of carrying out a mission in Damascus. I cannot understand why you’ve been sent here. Give me the information and my men will handle it.”

  “My sources have provided information that requires a particular set of talents,” Abu Qasim said.

  Alloush leaned forward and pointed at Abu Qasim. “I already have commanders who can run missions into the city.”

  “Once you have a sniper with one hundred and forty-two confirmed kills, perhaps the emir will not need to send his own,” Abu Qasim said. “Or a bomb-maker with so much . . . experience.” He looked down at his nine fingers.

  “Ah yes, I forgot, the Black Death,” Alloush said. He looked around the dank room, grinning, at the mention of Sarya’s nickname, given for the black hijab she wore while killing the regime’s foot soldiers and militia.

  Abu Qasim ignored him and Alloush called for tea. They sat again in silence until the tea boy arrived, leaving two steaming cups behind. “What’s the offer, then?” Alloush said as he took a sip.

  “First let me explain what we need,” Abu Qasim said. “We’ve brought the sniper rifle and some ammunition, but would like more. We also need small arms for basic security. Standard AKs will be fine, but we’ll need several crates of ammo. For the bomb, I need access to your explosives factory and its material stores. Maybe I spend two days there.”

  Alloush furrowed his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair. “That’s it?”

  “No. One more thing: I need several of your Republican Guard defectors.”

  “Why?”

  “They are your best.”

  “I know, that’s why I don’t want you to have them.”

  Abu Qasim pulled a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table. “It’s a personal request from the emir for these men.”

  Alloush looked at the paper and passed it back without reading. “The emir and I were brothers in Saydnaya. I don’t need to read it. What do I receive in exchange for this shopping list?”

  “You take credit for the operation. You go on television afterward. You use it to raise more capital in the Gulf.”

  Alloush ignored the bait. “What is the operation?”

  Abu Qasim smiled.

  28

  PAULINA JACKSON SAT ON HER WORKBENCH LISTENING to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “I Tried” on repeat through her headphones. The glory days were long past, but she was from Cleveland and loved this stuff. Focusing as the song played for the twentieth time that day, Jackson molded the sheet of Semtex with a government-issue steel tube that was, in effect, a glorified rolling pin. They wouldn’t use this one for the test today, but she still mumbled to herself not to mess this up. It’s gotta be perfect when those white-shoes from Langley show up for the demo. Pasted above her workbench was a picture of Ali Hassan walking on the street smoking a cigarette, snapped by one of the spooks in Damascus. They’d built a mock-up of the same road for practice, like they’d done before the SEAL raid to kill Bin Laden. Then, she had not really been involved, had only been able to steal a few glances at the Teams as they trained. Now it was her show.

  The copy of the lethal finding POTUS had signed had made it clear that there was no room for error. And so the suits inside the Special Activities Division had mandated a strict set of technical requirements for the bomb, all of which she knew by memory. After all, she’d already built and tested thirty-one of these damn things. She knew the design so well she’d given it her own nickname: the Frisbee. Fabricated to fit inside a Mitsubishi Pajero’s passenger seat stereo speaker, the explosion had to punch outward in a controlled burst to manage the blast force and dispersion.

  The first few tests had not gone well. The explosions had been too powerful and Rodney, her boss, had muttered about shrapnel going through the wall and killing babies. “The wall,” he would say as he pointed at the mock-up cinder-block wall. “Is it gonna go through that wall, Paulina? Gotta make sure it glances off, just a smooch, like you’re kissing your brother.” She had quickly reduced the Semtex to just under a quarter pound.

  She examined the Semtex plastic she had rolled out into the shape of a disc. She stood and walked over to the Pajero, parked behind her workbench in the hangar. She opened the front passenger door to see if the Frisbee fit inside the gap where the speaker had been. It did. The Frisbee’s shape, when detonated, would direct the explosion outward in a tight blast radius, reducing the potential for collateral damage.

  Music still blaring in her ears, Paulina returned to her workbench and began wiring the circuits that would link a passive infrared (PIR) sensor to a satellite phone. The CIA would call the sat phone to arm the circuit. When Ali crossed the plane of the PIR sensor, the circuit would close, allowing power to flow from the battery into a blasting cap snuggled into the Semtex, detonating the charge. “The team in Syria,” Rodney had said on the first day, wearing those weird Coke-bottle glasses and reading directly from the ops proposal, “proposes that the bigwigs at Langley verify the target’s identity, then a spotter in Damascus arms the PIR while maintaining visual contact with the target until he crosses the infrared plane and blows the charge.” The cable had been drafted by some case officer with a weird funny name. GOLDJAGGER, she remembered it was. Rodney took off his glasses. “Seems easy enough.”

  Finished linking the PIR and satellite phone to a nine-volt battery, she then wired the device to a Turkish-made blasting cap and set it on the workbench to inspect her handiwork, packing a lipper of Grizz chewing tobacco into her mouth as she did so. Satisfied, she bound the device together with electrical tape, spat into an empty coffee cup, and placed the Thuraya satellite phone and the PIR inside the door next to the Frisbee. She would connect the blasting cap to the Semtex once she had positioned the vehicle on the proving grounds. She closed the compartment. This one, she thought as she gently closed the Pajero’s door, was the best Frisbee yet. She drove the Pajero outside, through the hangar doors, past the blackened remains of the first Pajero—not her best bomb—and onto the proving ground’s parking lot next to the other three, which she assumed represented the vast majority of Pajeros available in the Western hemisphere. Even though Semtex is a stable explosive, she still avoided the potholes, because you never really could be sure.

  She checked her watch as she turned off the music, and rubbed her ears. The white-shoe from Langley would arrive in a few hours for the test. Where was the guy with the cadavers?

  ABU QASIM, HAD HE KNOWN, would have been jealous of Paulina’s professional operation, particularly her access to Semtex. For at the exact moment that Paulina was fabricating her Frisbee, Abu Qasim was clothed in a grimy smock in an underground workshop grumbling about the steep price he had paid for two kilos. Unlike Paulina Jackson and the CIA, though, Abu Qasim had no specific vendetta against the man, at least not relative to any of the other monsters inside the regime. He was targeting Ali Hassan for the simple fact that he was an important general. And he had a source who could plant the bomb at one of his meetings.

  Abu Qasim scanned the pictures of the tea cart and kicked at the shoddy plastic mock-up they’d stolen from one of Douma’s storage rooms. He reviewed the shelves and inspected a drawer filled with blasting caps. The bomb had to fit inside a box, on the lower rack of a tea cart. He examined the caps carefully, shaking his head gravely whenever he spotted one with rusty wires.

  Abu Qasim found a workable number-eight-type blasting cap. Two grams of a mixture of mercury fulminate and potassium chlorate packed into a metallic cylinder the size of a large pen, the fuse wires protruding from one end. The wires would receive electric current—he would use a prepaid cell phone for the trigger—detonating the cap and finally igniting the Semtex. Abu Q
asim smiled as he turned it over in his fingers. In Aleppo he’d not had the luxury of prefabricated blasting caps. In the early days, he’d been trying to synthesize mercury fulminate when it exploded, taking his left ring finger with it.

  Abu Qasim cut the orange Semtex from its plastic wrapping, picked up an aluminum tube from the floor—sufficiently thin to fragment when the Semtex exploded—and eyeballed how much length could fit on the tea cart. He drew a line with a black permanent marker and rummaged through a toolbox for a hacksaw. Finding one, he cut off the end. Then he rolled the Semtex into a tube as if it were modeling clay, periodically stopping to measure the diameter to ensure it could comfortably fit inside the aluminum tube. Opening a box of the 4.7-millimeter ball bearings he had requested from Alloush’s men, Abu Qasim individually pressed them into the plastic until the Semtex’s burnt-orange hue was replaced by a chromy metallic shine. He paused for a minute to wipe his sweaty hands on his smock and imagined one of the ball bearings tearing through Ali Hassan’s skull. Then he collected a spool of copper wire from one of the cabinets and unwrapped a nine-volt battery and two prepaid Nokia cell phones. Abu Qasim checked to ensure the phones were charged, then used each phone to call the other. Both worked. Using a red marker, he drew a large circle on the phone that he would implant in the device. He saved that phone’s number into the contacts of the other phone, which he colored with a green marker. He also wrote the number he would dial on a piece of tape and put it on the back of the green phone. To be safe, he removed the red phone’s battery. Then, using the wire, Abu Qasim began creating the circuit that, when completed, would set off the device. When he dialed the phone, an electrical current would flow from its circuit board into the blasting cap, detonating the Semtex.

  The fans shut off as the electricity flickered. Beads of sweat dripped on the workshop table as he fiddled with the wiring. When he was done with the circuit, he connected the phone and the nine-volt to the blasting cap, which would eventually be inserted into the Semtex. Finished, Abu Qasim squatted on all fours searching through a bin under the workshop table. He pulled out two strips of Velcro to attach the phone and battery to the tube, and stepped back to examine his work. It weighed less than five kilos and would fit nicely into a large cardboard box filled with tea and sugar. The walls rumbled with impacts aboveground, maybe barrel bombs. It was hard to tell so deep down. The electricity wobbled again. Abu Qasim looked up, then back to the bomb. One of his more straightforward creations, thanks to the Semtex Alloush’s militia had pilfered from the regime’s stockpiles.

  Still, he wished he could test it.

  RODNEY BROUGHT ED BRADLEY TO Paulina’s workbench to introduce the Chief to the bomb maker before the test. “Chief, good to meet you,” Paulina said, offering her right hand. She appreciated that Bradley didn’t balk at the missing finger or the leathery skin.

  “We’re getting everything set up now,” Rodney told Bradley as they left the hangar for the mock-up of the road in Damascus. Out on the proving ground, Paulina put on her aviators and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap and joined them in the raised observation stand. The group baked behind two feet of plexiglass in the July sun. Lyle, one of the techs, drove the Pajero onto the mock-up curb and parked.

  Bradley turned to Rodney. “We running a flesh test?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” Rodney said.

  “Always a little weird,” Bradley mumbled as he put on his own sunglasses and rolled up his sleeves.

  The most reliable bellwether of an explosion’s impact is actual human bone, muscle, and skin. There were no lab rats in bomb testing, but there were people who’d already died, and Paulina’s team could always get a few for high-profile tests like this one. Four technicians wheeled cadavers on Rollerblades out of the hangar toward the street mock-up, their body weight suspended on what Paulina always assumed were IV poles. Lyle positioned the Ali cadaver ten yards behind the Pajero’s trunk and then connected the IV pole to a long length of rope that would be pulled during the test to simulate a human walking. Then he arranged the other three around Ali as if they were innocent passersby. When signing the delivery forms, Paulina had learned that the cadaver playing the part of Ali was actually a sixty-year-old male named Darryl who’d died of a heart attack. She felt a little bad for Darryl.

  Lyle strung sensor packets on each cadaver that would measure the explosion’s “K factor,” or kilopascals—the pressure that would rupture air-filled voids in the human body such as lungs or eardrums. He then draped what looked like a large sheet over the mock-up version of the cinder-block wall. The sheet was a type of carbonless copy paper coated with a micro-encapsulated dye that would release when pressure was applied, displaying where fragments lodged. Lyle and the technicians wheeled similar sheets strung up on what looked like whiteboards to form a ring around the Pajero and the cadavers.

  “How long from dial to activation?” Bradley asked Paulina.

  “We tested calls using multiple satellite assets to pass the signal,” she said. “Half a second in all cases. Ali emerges from his office, Damascus team arms device from the safe house, Langley has time to validate the target’s identity, then as Ali crosses the plane of the car he goes boom. Gives us time to abort if pedestrians get in the way.”

  Bradley nodded. “Anything on this device U.S.-made?”

  Jackson shook her head. “All foreign. If they investigate, it will look like a terrorist made it. We didn’t buy American on this project.”

  Bradley smiled.

  “Device in the door speaker?” he asked.

  “That’s right.

  Bradley turned to the mock-up. “Let’s see it.”

  Lyle gave a thumbs-up and hustled up the stairs into the viewing tower. He opened a laptop connected to the sensors and stared at the screen for a moment. “We’re ready.”

  Jackson dialed the sat phone to arm the device. Then signaled down to Lyle, who began pulling the rope. The Ali cadaver slid along the sidewalk supported by the IV pole.

  There was a whump when the cadaver broke the infrared plane. The Pajero kicked slightly off the curb. Darryl’s head vanished and his shoulders and chest shredded into ropes of flesh. The IV pole listed, then Darryl fell toward the wall.

  The other three cadavers stood tall. “K23 on the others,” Lyle said. “Twenty-three kilopascals means they’d be safer than a breacher during an assault. Downright gentle.” The team left the observation post and toured the mock-up grounds for a few minutes to review the damage. There were minimal signs of fragmentation on the other cadavers. Lyle estimated based on the overpressure readings that even if pedestrians had stood exactly where the cadavers did, the worst-case scenario would have been a ruptured eardrum.

  Bradley walked the mock-up grounds for ten more minutes, Rodney following. Paulina excused herself for the glorious air-conditioning of the hangar. She packed in another fat lipper of Grizz to relax and sat with her feet up on the workbench staring at the picture of Ali Hassan. She opened one of the drawers and removed the photo of the dead case officer, the poor white girl who’d started this whole thing by getting herself kidnapped and killed in some godforsaken country. Paulina pinned the picture over the image of Ali Hassan and spit into her coffee cup.

  THOUGH ABU QASIM DID NOT have the resources of the U.S. government to support his bomb-making efforts, he was able to score one small victory: he put his weapon into position first.

  Abu Qasim, Sarya, and his team of four Republican Guard defectors—lent by Alloush—had entered central Damascus hidden in the back of a delivery van accompanied by ammunition, AK-47s, Sarya’s sniper rifle, and the crate that gave him heart palpitations every time they hit a bump.

  The safe house felt like a refugee camp: makeshift beds, garbage cans jammed to the rim, the fetid stink of sweat. Inside, they waited for two men to arrive. Sarya sat in the bedroom oiling the rifle’s bolt action and keeping her distance from the defectors.

  Abu Qasim heard the knock. He picked up his AK-47 and pointed
it toward the door. The defectors scrambled from their mats and did the same.

  There was a knock, then another. Then another. It was them.

  Abu Qasim opened the door and saw an old cleric and a young man wearing a blindfold. The cleric looked past Qasim into the safe house living room, at the troupe pointing AK-47s at the door. “Relax, brothers,” the cleric said. He was Umar, Abu Qasim’s agent in Damascus. He ran the network of sources who’d provided information on senior figures in the government. He had procured the safe house. He had discovered the time and place of Ali Hassan’s meeting. He had recruited this young man.

  Abu Qasim pulled them into the room and closed the door. Sarya emerged from the bedroom.

  Abu Qasim shook the young man’s hand. The grip was limp, his hand slick. “What is your name?”

  “Jibril.”

  “It is an honor, Jibril. Now, sit, we have much to discuss.”

  In the living room they sat on pillows and went through each step of the plan. Abu Qasim pointed Jibril toward the crate holding the bomb. “You put it on the bottom shelf of the tea cart,” he explained.

  Jibril was quiet. He nodded.

  Jibril cringed as Abu Qasim opened the crate. “You need to do just two things before the meeting,” he said. “Put the battery in the phone and turn it on. The battery is fully charged and should last for at least fifteen hours. But to be safe, turn it on no more than ten hours before the meeting starts. You understand that you wait to place this until they have all gathered for Ali Hassan’s meeting?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “It is still scheduled for July eighteenth?”