The Kill List Read online

  Meanwhile, he had another call to make with the same request he had vainly put to Langley.

  He took an official car again but this time went in a civilian suit with shirt and tie. Since 9/11, the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue has also been heavily protected. The grandiose building stands next to the Naval Observatory, home of the Vice President and also heavily guarded.

  Access to the embassy avoids the columned portico at the front and is achieved down a small street to one side. His car stopped at the hut beside the barrier pole, and he offered his pass through the car’s open window. There was a consultation by handheld phone. Whatever the reply, it was enough for the pole to be lifted and the car to roll into the small parking lot. Less important creatures park outside and enter on foot. Space is scarce.

  The door was much less grand than the front entrance, for security reasons now hardly used and only then by the ambassador and American visitors of exalted rank. Once inside, Tracker turned to the glass-windowed booth and again offered his identity card. It mentioned a certain Col. James Jackson.

  Another phone conference, then the invitation to take a seat. Within two minutes, the elevator door opened and a young man emerged, evidently a junior in the pecking order.

  “Colonel Jackson?” There was no one else in the lobby. He, too, examined the ID card. “Please come with me, sir.”

  It was, as Tracker knew it would be, the fifth floor, the defense attachés’ floor, the level the American cleaning staff never entered. Cleaning had to be done by the lowest, albeit British, forms of life.

  On the fifth floor, the young man led Tracker down a corridor past several door plaques announcing the inhabitants, and finally to a door with no marking but with a card-swipe mechanism instead of a handle. He knocked and on the command from inside swiped the card, swung the door open and gestured Tracker to enter. He did not follow but quietly closed the door.

  It was an elegant room, with bulletproof windows giving onto the avenue. It was an office but definitely not the “bubble,” which was where conferences only of cosmic clearance level took place. That room was in the center of the building, surrounded on all sides, including floor and ceiling, by a vacuum and without windows. The technique of beaming a ray onto window glass and reading the conversation inside from the vibrations had been used against the American embassy in Moscow during the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.

  The man coming around the corner of his desk, hand outstretched, was also in a suit with a striped tie that Tracker, after his years in London, presumed to be the hallmark of a rather good school. He was not quite expert enough to recognize the colors of Harrow.

  “Colonel Jackson? Welcome. Our first meet, I think. Konrad Armitage. I took the liberty of ordering coffee. How do you take it?”

  He could have asked one of the glamorous young secretaries employed on that floor to enter from the side door and serve it but chose to do so himself. Recently arrived from London, Konrad Armitage was the head of station for the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.

  He knew perfectly well who his visitor was from his predecessor and welcomed the meeting. The awareness of common cause, common interest and common enemy was mutual.

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “An odd request but brief. I could have sent it the usual way, but I figured we probably ought to meet one day anyway so I just cut to the chase.”

  “Quite right. And the request?”

  “Does your service have a contact or, better still, an asset buried down among the al-Shabaab in Somalia?”

  “Wow. That’s an odd one, all right. Not my specialty. We have a desk, of course. I’ll have to ask. May I inquire: Is it the Preacher?”

  Armitage was no clairvoyant. He knew who the Tracker was and what he did. Britain had just had its fourth murder committed by a young fanatic inspired by the online sermons of the Preacher, as opposed to America’s six, and both services knew how their governments wanted to put an end to this man.

  “Could be,” said the Tracker.

  “Well, excellent, then. As you know, we have a presence, as do your friends at Langley, inside Mogadishu, but if they have anyone out in the wild places, I’d be surprised if they haven’t proposed a joint operation. But I’ll have the request in the London office by morning.”

  The reply took only two days, but it was the same as that from the CIA. And Armitage was right: If either country was running a source inside South Somalia, it would have been too valuable not to share—both the costs and the “product.”

  The reply from Javad inside the ISI was much more helpful. One of those to whom he pretended to report back about his spying on the Americans was a contact in the notorious S Wing, which “covered,” in every sense, myriad groups dedicated to Jihadism and violence that inhabited the border strip from Kashmir to Quetta.

  It would have been far too risky for Javad to have asked outright; it would have blown his cover and revealed his true employers. But part of his ISI job was to have authorized access to the Americans and to frequent their company. He pretended he had eavesdropped on a conversation between diplomats at a cocktail party. Out of curiosity, the S Wing officer consulted the archive database, and Javad, standing behind him, noted the file he accessed.

  When he had shut down, the S Wing officer ordered that the Yankees be told there was no such trace. Later, by night, Javad reaccessed the database and punched up the file.

  There was such a mention but years old. It came from an ISI spy in Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade of fanatics and killers. It mentioned a new arrival from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a fanatic for whom the raids against Kashmir had proved too tame. The young recruit spoke Arabic and Pashto, which was what had facilitated his acceptance into 313. The Brigade was composed mainly of Arabs and cooperated closely with the Pashto-speaking Haqqani clan. The report added that this was his usefulness, but he had yet to prove himself as a fighter. He had amber eyes, and styled himself Abu Azzam.

  So that was why he had disappeared nine years ago. He had changed his terror group and changed his name.

  The U.S.’s Counter-Terrorism Center has a vast database on Jihadist terror groups, and punching in Abu Azzam produced a cornucopia.

  Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, there were seven great warlords who comprised the Mujahideen, applauded and supported by the West as “patriots,” “partisans” and “freedom fighters.” To them, and them alone, went the huge quantities of money and weapons channeled into the Afghan mountains to defeat the Russians. But the moment the last Soviet tank rolled back into Russia, two of them reverted to the vicious killers they had always been. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the other was Jalaluddin Haqqani.

  Though a warlord and master of his native province of Paktia, Haqqani switched sides when the Taliban swept the warlords aside and came to power and he became commander of the Taliban forces.

  After their defeat by the Americans and Northern Alliance, he moved again, crossing the border and setting himself up in Waziristan, inside the Pakistan border. Succeeded by his three sons, he created the Haqqani network; basically, the Pakistani Taliban.

  This became a hub for terror strikes against American and NATO forces over the border and against the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, which became an ally of the U.S. He attracted to his network the remaining al-Qaeda forces not dead or in jail and any other Jihadist fanatic. One of these was Ilyas Kashmiri, who brought with him his 313 Brigade, part of the Shadow Army.

  What the Tracker could surmise was that the fanatical and eager-to-rise Zulfiqar Ali Shah, now calling himself Abu Azzam, was among them.

  What he could not know was that Abu Azzam, while avoiding going into mortal danger in raids into Afghanistan, developed a taste for killing and became the 313 Brigade’s most enthusiastic executioner.

  One by one, the leading figures of Haqqani, Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Brigade were identified by the Americans, located with local
information and targeted for drone strikes. In those mountain fastnesses, they were immune to army attack, as Pakistan discovered with huge losses, but could not hide for long from the UAVs, endlessly patrolling over their heads, soundless, invisible, watching everything, photographing everything and listening to everything.

  The HVTs, the high-value targets, were blown to pieces, replaced by others, who were, in turn, blown away, until leadership became virtually a sentence of death.

  But the old links with S Wing of Pakistan’s ISI never died. The ISI had created the Taliban in the first place and never lost sight of a single prediction: The Yankees have the clocks, but the Afghans have the time. One day, they calculated, the Americans will pack up and go. The Taliban might well retake Afghanistan, and Pakistan does not want two enemies, India and Afghanistan, on her borders. One will be enough, and that will be India.

  There was one more chapter in the mass of data that the Tracker had unleashed. The 313 Brigade, with its leaders, including Kashmiri, blasted into infinity, ebbed away but was replaced by the even more fanatic and sadistic Khorosan, and Abu Azzam was at the heart of it.

  Khorosan was no more than two hundred and fifty ultras, mostly Arabs and Uzbeks, targeted at the local natives who were selling information to U.S.-paid agents, particularly the whereabouts of the top targets. Khorosan had no talent for gathering its own intelligence, but a limitless capacity to terrify by public torture.

  Whenever a drone-launched missile wiped out a house containing a terror leader, the Khorosan would arrive to snatch a sample of local citizens and inflict so-called courts, preceded by extreme interrogation involving electric shocks, electric drills or red-hot irons. The court would be presided over by an imam or mullah, often self-styled. Confessions were almost guaranteed and sentences other than death exceptional.

  The habitual method of death was throat cutting. The merciful procedure involves the knife penetrating from the side, razor edge forward. A quick slice outward will open the jugular vein, carotid artery, trachea and esophagus, bringing instant death.

  But a goat is not killed that way because maximum blood loss is needed to tenderize the meat. Then the throat is opened by a hacking, seesawing motion from the front. To make a human prisoner suffer and to demonstrate contempt, the goat method is used.

  Having passed sentence, the presiding priest would then sit and watch it carried out. One of them was Abu Azzam.

  There was one more item in the file. About 2009, a roaming preacher began to sermonize in the mosques along the peaks of North and South Waziristan. The CTC file gave him no name, saying only that he spoke Urdu, Arabic and Pashto and was a most powerful orator who could bring his audiences to extremes of religious exultation. Then, about 2010, he vanished. He had never been heard of in Pakistan since.

  • • •

  The two men sitting in the corner of the bar of the Washington Mandarin Oriental attracted no attention. There was no reason why they should. Both were early to mid-forties, both in dark suits with white shirt and neutral tie. Both looked lean and hard, slightly military, with that indefinable air that says “Been in combat.”

  One was the Tracker. The other had introduced himself as Simon Jordan. He did not like to meet with complete strangers inside the embassy if it could just as well be done outside. Hence the meeting in the discreet bar.

  Back in his home country, his first name was really Shimon, and his surname had nothing to do with any river. He was the head of station of the Mossad in the Israeli embassy.

  The Tracker’s request was the same as he had placed with Konrad Armitage and the result was much the same. Simon Jordan also knew perfectly well who the Tracker was, what TOSA really did and, as an Israeli, thoroughly approved of both. But he did not have any answer at his fingertips.

  “Of course, there is someone back home at the Office who will cover that part of the world, but I will have to put the question to him. You are, I suppose, in a hurry?”

  “I’m an American. Are we ever anything else?”

  Jordan laughed with genuine appreciation. He liked self-deprecation. Very Israeli.

  “I’ll ask at once and request no delay.” He held up the card in the name of Jackson that the Tracker had given him. “I suppose this is a secure number?”

  “Very.”

  “Then I’ll use it. And on one of our secure lines.”

  He knew perfectly well that the Americans would listen to anything coming out of the Israeli embassy, but allies try to maintain the courtesies.

  They parted. The Israeli had a car waiting, with a driver at the wheel. It would take him to the door. He did not like to be ostentatious, but he was “declared,” which meant he might be recognized. Driving himself or taking a cab was not a wise way of avoiding a kidnap. Having a former Golani Brigade commando at the wheel and an Uzi in the back was better. On the other hand, he did not, like an “undeclared,” have to go through a lot of rigmarole involving double-backs and side entrances.

  The Tracker, among his other habits that raised official eyebrows, did not like a chauffeur-driven car if he could avoid it. Nor did he like to spend hours in the gridlocks between downtown D.C. and his office in the forest. He used a motorcycle, with helmet and visor in a pannier under the seat. But it was not a rolling armchair; it was a Honda Fireblade, a transport with which there is not much point in arguing.

  • • •

  Having read the file from Javad, the Tracker was convinced, though he could not know it rightly, that Abu Azzam had fled the too-dangerous mountains of the Afghan/Pak border for what seemed the safer climes of the Yemen.

  In 2008, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, was in its infancy, but among its leaders was an American-raised Yemeni called Anwar al-Awlaki, fluent in English with an American accent. He was establishing himself as a brilliantly effective online sermonizer, reaching out to the teeming diaspora youth of Britain and the U.S. He also became the mentor of the newly arrived, also English-speaking Pakistani.

  Awlaki had been born of Yemeni parents in New Mexico, where his father was studying agriculture. Raised virtually as an American boy, Awlaki was first brought to Yemen, age seven, in 1978. He completed secondary education there, then returned to the U.S. for college in Colorado and San Diego. In 1993, age twenty-two, he went to Afghanistan, and it seems it was there that he converted to ultra-violent Jihadism.

  Like most Jihadi terrorists, he had no Koranic scholarship at all, confining himself to extremist propaganda. But back in the States, he managed to become resident imam at the Rabat Mosque in San Diego, and at another in Falls Church, Virginia. On the threshold of arrest for passport fraud, he quit for Britain.

  Here he traveled widely on speaking tours. Then came 9/11, and the West woke up at last. The net tightened, and in 2004 he left Britian and returned to Yemen. He was briefly arrested and imprisoned on kidnap and terrorism charges but was released after pressure from his influential tribe. By 2008, he had discovered his true slot—as a firebrand sermonizer, using the Internet as his pulpit.

  And he had an effect. Several killings took place at the hands of ultras converted by listening to his lectures calling for murder and destruction. And he formed a partnership with a brilliant Saudi bombmaker named Ibrahim al-Asiri. It was Awlaki who persuaded the young Nigerian Abdulmutallab to agree to die by suicide bomb in an airliner over Detroit, and Asiri who built the undetectable bomb into his undershorts. Only a malfunction saved the plane—but not the Nigerian’s genitalia.

  As Awlaki’s sermons became more and more effective on YouTube—he was regularly downloaded 150,000 times—Asiri became more and more skilled with his bombs. Eventually, both went on the kill list in April 2010. By then, he had been joined by his secretive and self-effacing disciple from Pakistan.

  Two attempts were made to track him and destroy him: one involved the Yemeni army, who let him slip away when his village was surrounded; the other was when a U.S. missile from a drone destroyed the house he was supposed to be in.
But he had left.

  Justice finally caught up with him on a lonely track in North Yemen on 30 September 2011. He had been staying at the village of Khashef and was identified by a junior acolyte, who took dollars to make the “squeal.” Within hours, a Predator, launched out of a secret pad in the Saudi desert across the border, was circling over him.

  In Nevada, eyes watched the three parked Toyota Land Cruisers—the al-Qaeda vehicle of choice—in the village square, but permission to launch was denied because of the women and children nearby. At dawn on the thirtieth, he was seen to climb into the lead vehicle. The cameras were so good that when he looked up, his face filled the entire plasma screen at Creech Air Force Base.

  Two Land Cruisers set off, but the third seemed in trouble. Its hood was up, and someone seemed to be working on the engine. Unbeknownst to the watchers, there were three more waiting to board that vehicle, and the U.S. would have liked them all.

  One was Asiri the bombmaker himself. Another was Fahd al-Quso, deputy head under Awlaki at AQAP. He had been one of those behind the killing of seventeen U.S. sailors on the destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000. He would later die in another drone strike in May 2012.

  The third was an unknown to the Americans. He never looked up, his head was shrouded and masked against the dust, and no one saw that he had amber eyes.

  The two leading SUVs set off down a dusty track into Jawf Province, but they kept apart so the watchers in Nevada did not know which to strike. Then they stopped for breakfast and parked side by side. There were eight figures grouped around the vehicles. Two drivers and four bodyguards, and the other two were American citizens: Awlaki himself and Samir Khan, editor of the English-language online Jihadi magazine Inspire.

  The NCO at Creech told senior authority what he had in the target frame. From Washington, a voice murmured: “Take the shot.” It was a J-SOC major, a soccer mom, about to take her kids to evening practice.