RW16 - Domino Theory Read online

  And then there was Mongoose — aka Thomas “Mongoose” Yamya. Mongoose is a Filipino-American, and we’ve heard rumors that his grandfather’s father’s father was with MacArthur during World War II. If so, he certainly passed on his fighting genes, because as you’d expect from anyone who’s gone through BUDS and lived to tell about it, Mongoose is one tough customer. Some of his deeds during the service are still classified, but he seems to know a god-awful amount about the geography of Afghanistan.

  Mongoose and Shotgun went through our Red Cell orientation as classmates. They formed a common bond during that process — Trace, who heads our training program, tends to do that to people. Since then they’ve become close friends, a bit like frick and frack, thump and thud, barbell and dumbell, arts and crafts … you get the picture. Definitely an odd couple, but they make beautiful music together.

  The Goose stands five-six in platform hiking boots. Shotgun could probably fit him in one of his pockets. Mongoose rarely eats more than a half burger in a week. Shotgun — well, you know.

  Shotgun is always smiling. I’m not sure Mongoose is familiar with the concept.

  People look at Mongoose and say, “His bark is worse than his bite.” Me, I have a healthy respect for rabies, so I’ve never tried to find out.

  Last but not least, there was Junior.

  Junior is Matthew Loring. He was hired as a tech expert, a fill-in for our number one computer dweeb, Shunt. But since joining the crew, he’s gone on to bigger and better things, surviving Trace’s orientation and basic shooter classes. He’s pretty much an all-around hand at the moment, a guy we can put into various situations.

  Still a bit green, but he has potential.

  And oh, yeah, he bears a slight resemblance to yours truly. Some people say more than slight, in fact.

  That’s because Matthew is my son.

  I’m not going to go through the backstory here. If you’re interested, you can look it up. Suffice to say that, by mutual agreement, Matt is treated absolutely no differently than any other member of the team — just like shit.

  Well, truth be told, I may kick his butt a little harder than the others. Paternal love is a bitch.

  * * *

  While they packed their kits and caught the first plane out, I went over to an abandoned Indian air force base about twenty miles outside of town. Special Squadron Zero had taken over a small administrative building there as its headquarters. The basement had an old brig with enough rooms for the tangos we’d grabbed from Kashmir.

  The accommodations would have rated five stars on the Michelin Guide to Scurvy Prisons. Most recently, the basement had been used to quarantine rabid dogs, and though that had been at least a decade before, the stench lingered. Special Squadron Zero had applied fresh whitewash on the walls and updated some of the iron bars with thick steel panels. But the place still stank of animal piss. I felt bad for the guards.

  We’d quickly identified the masterminds from the photos we had. The man we’d taken by mistake had been relatively compliant; he was basically a scared and mixed up if murderous nineteen-year-old. He’d been interviewed four or five times, and his story more or less tracked with what Fatty had told us the day before. Captain Birla was just holding on to him now until he could figure out which of the country’s myriad agencies to ship him to.

  Our other guests were a much different story. Neither was talking. They were isolated in separate cells, hands cuffed behind their backs and feet manacled together. Blindfolded and kept in the dark besides, neither man had been allowed to sleep — some horrible Indian pop music was playing at crack-your-eardrums level when I came onto the cell block.

  I don’t often get to play good cop, but that was my role that morning. Cop isn’t the right word, really. Good imam is a lot closer.

  And come to think of it, saying that we were interrogating our “guests” may give you the wrong idea as well. In fact, the process was really more like that old television game show Truth or Consequences.

  Our first contestant’s name was Yusef from Kavali, a city on India’s eastern coast. A hood was put on him and he was removed from his cell.

  The guards walked him around a bit, up and down a few flights of stairs, adding to Yusef’s general befuddlement before bringing him on stage. They sat him in a room only a little bigger than his cell. There were no tables, and only one chair. They made Yusef stand in front of the chair. They’d poke him when he started to sag, but otherwise didn’t hit him — that kind of force is unnecessary as a general rule.

  I watched him for a while through the slit in the door. We had a hidden video camera, but I like the immediacy of seeing him with my own eyes. He was about five-eight, and even in the bulky prison clothes he looked malnourished.

  Him I could have carried out of the school under one arm.

  I stepped aside as our interrogators went into the room. All three were dressed in plain khaki uniforms that bore no unit markings or ranks. They did, however, look very much like the uniforms worn by the Pakistani army.

  What a remarkable coincidence.

  They were also wearing ski masks covering their faces. No sense giving themselves away.

  The guards left. Two of the men stood behind the prisoner, on either side; the third stood in front of him.

  No one said anything for a few moments. Then, the man facing Yusef nodded. The man at the prisoner’s right took hold of his handcuff chain.

  “You are a failure,” said the man facing the prisoner. He used Arabic first, but then switched to English. “Do you know why you are here?”

  The prisoner said nothing.

  “Answer me!”

  When he didn’t, the interrogator nodded again, and the guard on the left gave our guest a love tap on the temple.

  No, it wasn’t hard at all.

  “Your name,” demanded the interrogator.

  No answer. Another slap.

  “You told us it was Yusef,” said the interrogator. “Was that a lie?”

  The prisoner’s shoulders straightened — the way the interrogator had phrased the question surely caught him by surprise. But he said nothing.

  “Naam,” snapped the interrogator. He’d switched to Urdu.

  Another jerk of the shoulders, but no answer. This time the guard didn’t hit him. The interrogator asked another question — where is your wife — also in Urdu.

  I waited by the door, giving the prisoner time just in case he decided to respond.

  Most of these guys weren’t married, and we had no reason to believe he was either. But you never know. While he wasn’t likely to answer verbally, his body language gave us plenty to go on for future sessions.

  “When did you decide to become a murderer?” asked the interrogator.

  Nothing.

  “Jawab!” ordered the interrogator. “Answer!”

  That was my cue. I slid the little panel on the door back and entered the room.

  The three Special Squadron Zero members snapped to attention as I came in. They said nothing, but even with the hood covering his head, the prisoner could sense something was up. I pulled the chair over and cleared my throat.

  The prisoner’s hood was removed. His blindfold was undone.

  He had trouble adjusting his eyes to the light. He blinked a few times, then stared at me.

  I was wearing a long, gray kurta over a pair of black pants. The kurta is a shirt popular in Pakistan and other Muslim countries. It’s somewhat old-fashioned, but the sort of thing someone might wear in a tribal area or even in the city if you were underlining your status as a follower of a certain brand of Islam.

  It went very well with my beard. I’d let the beard grow extra long for my trip to Cuba, and by now it looked very much like the beards you saw on the Sabbath at devout mosques around the world.

  Inevitably, his eyes went to the small package in my hand. It was a Koran wrapped in brown paper and covered by a silk cloth, wrapped and tied so that it could not be defiled by a random unbeliever.
I held it out toward him.

  He didn’t move to take it. I pretended that the reason must be his handcuffs, and pointed to the guard on the left, who was holding them. He undid them quickly.

  The prisoner rubbed his wrists, but still didn’t reach for the Koran. I pulled back and folded my arms, glancing at the man standing beside me.

  “Now, Yusef, we expect you to cooperate with us,” said the interrogator. His voice was much softer, as if he were trying to impress me that he was a gentleman. “There is a traitor in your unit. We have narrowed down the suspects. You must cooperate with us. Your life depends on it.”

  “Who are you?” said Yusef.

  “We have supported you,” continued the interrogator, ignoring the question. “Given you food and clothes. We are repaid with treachery.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Yusef glared at me. I stared back without saying anything.

  In case you’re wondering, aside from some useful phrases like “how much?” and “where’s the restroom?” I don’t speak Urdu, which is the national language of Pakistan and spoken by just about everyone there. I’m not very much on Hindi either, let alone the more obscure languages commonly spoken in India. But I didn’t have to speak. The game plan was for me to sit there, a semibenevolent presence.

  “You would prefer to use the language of our enemies?” said the interrogator. He switched to Hindi. “When you infiltrated to India, who did you talk to?”

  Yusef pretended not to understand. At that point, I decided to ad-lib.

  “Use English,” I said softly. “He may be more comfortable with the devil’s tongue.”

  “I’m not a traitor,” said Yusef in Urdu. “Why am I being treated like one?”

  * * *

  The idea was to convince our two guests that they were questioned not by the Indian secret service, but by Pakistanis. Our story was that the terrorist training operation had been betrayed by a spy, and that the Pakistanis had gotten wind of the betrayal.

  We never said any of that explicitly. The idea was to suggest just enough, and let the prisoner fill in the blanks. We figured that he would be more forthcoming if he thought he was trying to prove his loyalty. We also thought he was more likely to tell us the truth.

  The big problem with an interrogation — any interrogation — is that sooner or later the subject decides to cut his losses and just tell whoever’s asking what they want to hear. That was something I learned a long time ago, not from the navy, but from the nuns back at St. Ladislaus. I’ve never met a better group of interrogators in my life. And they never left a mark where it showed.

  * * *

  Yusef was extremely suspicious, and after insisting that he was loyal to the cause, he clammed his mouth shut.

  “Which cause?” demanded the interrogator. “Ours or theirs?”

  He didn’t answer. I gave it five more minutes, then rose. I handed the Koran to the interrogator and walked out.

  Good imam gone, the handcuffs and taps on the side of the head returned. But they failed to loosen his tongue, and Yusef soon found himself rehooded and on his way back to the cell.

  By this time, Captain Birla had joined me in the observation room, where we were watching the proceedings on the closed-circuit video.

  “I don’t know, Commander Rick,” he said. “They are very tough nuts to be cracking.”

  “They’ll open up soon enough,” I told him.

  We went through our little game with the second captive, whose name was Arjun.

  Lest you should get the impression that these guys were Boy Scouts, let me give you a little background on Arjun.

  Arjun was born in India, though we were never able to determine exactly where. His family were moderately devout Sunnis. His older brother was sent to the U.S. to study. Arjun went to England. Oxford, I believe, though my memory on that may be faulty.

  There he studied chemistry. He did well, graduated, and got a job. But within a year he’d quit. Apparently he had some sort of mental or spiritual breakdown. He went home, but didn’t stay very long. Within a few weeks, he was in Pakistan.

  Three months after that, Pakistani border guards caught him trying to sneak over the border into Afghanistan with some friends. The only problem for the border guards was that Arjun and his friends didn’t want to be searched, and they made that quite clear. The border guards insisted. Arjun and the others pulled out sawed-off rifles and pressed their points home. All four of the border guards died.

  About four months later, presumably after adventures we have no record of, Arjun drove a pair of suicide bombers to an open air market in Kabul.

  We know this because the terrorist cell he was a member of recorded the event and posted it on YouTube. Very nice.

  His little bit wasn’t in the edited video. Shunt found it later, posted with some material on a relatively obscure but still public domain used to help recruit jihadists to the cause. It was the director’s cut version, I guess.

  After Kabul, Arjun was sent back to Pakistan. Along the way, he ran into some sort of trouble. His name and face were connected to the border incident, making him famous enough to earn bullet-point status on the alert sheets passed among international customs officials. By then, he’d joined the madrassa, no doubt aiming for a major finale to his career.

  Which brings him back to our little game show. We went through essentially the same routine with him that we had with Yusef. This time, though, I had our interrogator add a little hint about our friend Fatty.

  “Aban Khalid believed you were the traitor,” said our interrogator about ten minutes into the show, just after we’d switched to English.

  That got the first visible reaction from Arjun since he’d been brought into the room. His eyes narrowed, and I could see that he was straining not to say anything.

  The interrogator saw it, too.

  “Is our comrade lying?”

  Arjun took one of those deep breaths you take when you’re reassuring yourself that you have to hang tough.

  “We know that you saw others when you were in India last,” said the interrogator. He was making it up, of course. “And we know that you were not pure.”

  “No one is required to be a saint,” I said.

  Arjun lowered his head.

  The interrogator’s wild guess had hit pay dirt. He moved in, a lion culling a wildebeest from the pack.

  “You should make a clean breast of it … There is no need to hold back from us … A way can be found to redeem yourself … You must not let this go too far … If we can stanch the blood now, there will be hope…”

  Give Arjun credit — he didn’t fold. After a few minutes, I realized it was going to take another few cycles to break him down. He was definitely going to tell us everything we wanted, but it would take a few more spin cycles before he came clean.

  I rose, and handed him the Koran.

  He took it.

  I watched for a few minutes from the observation room as the interrogator stepped up the pressure. He wavered a bit, head shaking, sweat slipping off his brow, but ultimately kept quiet.

  He wasn’t exactly a weak puppy, but the flashes of vulnerability did worry me a bit. Our intelligence had pegged him as an organizer and planner; those types are generally the toughest to break. I had to consider if the long-beard godfathers who were running the show might not have seen the sort of weakness I was observing now. If so, they might have decided to use him in a way that would mislead us if he was captured and spilled his guts.

  With all the high-tech gear we have available — the bugs, the GPS locators, the radio-wave snatching aircraft, the Predators, our satellites, you name it — intelligence still comes down to the gray matter between the ears. It’s always a judgment call.

  If it wasn’t, then Naval Intelligence wouldn’t be an oxymoron.

  ( II )

  After leaving the fun and games room, I headed over to the hotel to get changed. I’d been invited to a government soir
ee that evening, and was expected to put in an appearance.

  I know what you’re thinking. What are we talking about here, Dick? A cocktail party? Beautiful Indian women in swirly dresses handing you champagne and swooning while you entertain them with stories of derring-do.

  Pretty much.

  It is tough work, though. Don’t forget their jealous husbands plotting revenge on the far side of the room.

  Seriously, while the fawning attention of some pretty young thing is always a boost to the ego, the truth is I’d rather have been sawing wood — either literally at my woodpile back at Rogue Manor, or figuratively, catching my almost-mandatory three hours of sleep.

  The fawning attention of pretty young things would have been quite a relief from the monotony of the overfed bureaucrats I actually shared gin with that evening. The party was a pre-pre-pregame shindig for some of the corporate sponsors and government officials. They waddled from one side of the food table to the other, congratulating each other on the excellence of the upcoming show of athleticism. A few officials from the sports teams already in town had been invited. Unfortunately, the Scottish Women’s Field Hockey Team was not among them.

  I would have liked to have seen Trace in something swishy.

  But there was one saving grace: Minister Dharma was there. She came in late, of course, timing her entrance for maximum effect. Actually anytime she entered, it would have had maximum effect.

  You’re probably picturing a woman in a tight black cocktail dress that ended well north of her knees. I’m picturing that as well. But that wasn’t her style. India still has what we would consider quaint notions about women and how they should dress. Trace complained about several newspaper stories that blamed rapes on the fact that the victims were wearing dungarees. If the minister had worn anything like you and I are fantasizing about, she never would have been taken seriously as a politician.

  Minister Dharma was the picture of sensible Indian womanhood, wearing what they call a sari — a velvety violet dress over an even longer dress topped by a matching scarf. There was maybe a postage stamp’s worth of skin showing at her neck. But that was more than enough. There was no question that every male in the room, yours truly included, was staring at one or the other stars in the patterned dress as she came down the steps.