Call to kill, p.10
Call to Kill, page 10
‘Fuck yes!’ screamed Pommy. He and Briggs gave each other a high five.
‘Come on boys,’ said Hopkins. ‘Let’s go and get Mace. Bring the bastard home.’
The five men grabbed their bags, rifles and spare ammo and piled out. They followed Captain Hopkins along the corridor and out through the back door to where the helicopters were positioned. By now, Jonny would have the rotors on the Chinook turning and in three minutes they would be airborne, doing what the army should have done all along.
Hopkins kicked open the back door and they emerged into the blinding desert light. As his eyes adjusted, Peter Hopkins saw that something was wrong. The blades of the helicopters were not turning, a lone member of the ground staff was performing some routine maintenance on one of the Chinooks and Jonny was standing alone in the landing zone, arms stretched out wide. The helicopters were stationary, the pilots were nowhere to be seen.
Hopkins looked back to his men. Their faces were a picture of confusion and bewilderment.
‘What the fuck?’ said Jack.
Hopkins stormed over to the RAF ground staff engineer who was working on the chopper.
‘Why isn’t this bird ready to fly?’ he screamed.
The engineer’s face creased up in blank confusion, but before he could say a word, Peter Hopkins pulled his weapon and pointed it in his face.
‘Pete, what’s going on?’ said Craig, but Hopkins wasn’t listening.
‘Start it up,’ Hopkins ordered, ‘or I will fucking shoot you.’
Jack and Craig looked at each other, the reality of the situation kicking in. The Rupert had lost it. The penny dropped for them all at once: the order to go after Mace had not been given. Now Hopkins was in danger of getting them all arrested.
‘Pete.’ Jack moved towards the officer, his weapon lowered, his hand outstretched.
‘Not now, Jack.’ Hopkins stood his ground, his gun still pointed at the RAF technician.
‘Pete.’ Jack stood in front of the gun, taking hold of it and lowering the barrel. ‘It’s over, Pete.’
‘The fucking spineless bastards.’ Hopkins couldn’t contain the tears. Jack took the gun from him and put a consoling hand on the younger man’s shoulder. He had often written off Ruperts as posh boys who were more concerned with furthering their own careers than simply getting the job done. But Hopkins was all right. He would have disobeyed his orders, put himself on the line to save Mason, and that went a long way to win Jack’s respect. But if they were going to save Mason, then they needed the whole team and all the support that the army could give them. A cowboy rescue would only get them all killed.
‘Come on,’ said Jack, leading Hopkins back to the building. ‘Mace will be all right. He’s the toughest bastard I ever met. If anyone can get himself out of a situation, it’s him.’
Seventeen
US Embassy, Aden, Yemen
When she saw the word ‘Sodalicious!’ flash up on her phone for what felt like the hundredth time, Redford put it down and knocked back the last mouthful of her fourth cup of coffee. She hadn’t slept since she’d heard the news that Matt Mason was MIA. Instead, she’d sat at her desk in the US Embassy in Aden playing Gandy Crush and waiting for Langley to call. When she’d called in the new intel about Saladin, her superiors had wanted her to bring the translator in for questioning, but Redford had convinced them to hold off and even managed to get them to authorise a trace on Saladin’s phone.
In the previous ten years, the CIA had overtaken the NSA in the field of tech-based surveillance. The Centre for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) team at Langley had developed thousands of lines of code, building trojans, viruses and other strategic malware that could be used to penetrate backdoor vulnerabilities in the operating systems of pretty much every commercially available device, so that iPhones, Androids, even the smart TVs and speakers in your living room could be turned on and off from Virginia and converted into covert listening devices without the user’s knowledge. While the world was sleepwalking into a system of self-surveillance, the CIA had effectively created its own shadow NSA, with all the power but none of the accountability.
Since Redford’s call, the in-house hackers had worked around the clock to set up a wider surveillance operation on Saladin, so that they were now running 24/7 surveillance on all his calls and using the inbuilt microphone on his phone to monitor his real-life conversations. While Redford waited, three CCI analysts were working shifts in Langley, waiting for him to make his next move. She was sure that, sooner or later, the Yemeni translator would make contact with Faisal. With luck, Matt Mason’s name would crop up in relation to Shahlai’s location.
She poured herself a caffeine refill and wondered whether the British soldier whom she had met a week before was alive or dead. The British decision not to look for him seemed to her to be a gross strategic error, but she also felt that it could be exploited to her advantage. If Mason was alive, then she felt sure that Shahlai would be preparing to make the most of his new asset. If she knew Shahlai, and she did, then Saladin and Matt Mason could be key to helping her answer the questions of how, when and where he was going to strike next:
Redford browsed the file that she had put together on the Yemeni translator. To her, the potential of Saladin was huge. Once an agent knows that a target has been spying, she has leverage over him. There was no point getting upset about it. If you were spying on them, then chances were they were spying on you too—it was just part of the game. So Redford always liked to ask, herself how she could turn a vulnerability into an asset. Saladin was passing intel to Shahlai, which meant that there was an opportunity for her to use him to take control, to reverse that flow of information, to manipulate the manipulator. Saladin was a gift that had fallen into her lap; now the challenge was how to use it to her greatest advantage.
Her screen lit up with a message from Langley that Saladin’s device was live. She placed her headphones over her ears and listened to the sound of the phone ringing. She glanced at the display, noting that the translator was receiving an incoming call from within Yemen.
‘Huh,’ she heard Saladin answer in the customary way.
‘Can you hear me?’ came the usual reply. Cell phone reception was notoriously bad in Yemen and most callers preferred to check that they had a decent connection before wasting their breath on something that wouldn’t be heard.
‘Yes, I hear you,’ Saladin replied.
Redford pressed the headphones closer to her ears, listening for clues as to who the caller might be or where he was calling from. They were speaking in Arabic, but the caller had used poor grammar when he’d asked his question. And in fact, when she thought about it, he had a very confused accent. He was rolling his ‘h’s rather than dragging them from the back of the throat the way natural Semitic speakers did. She could swear there was a hint of British in it. It had to be Faisal Ahadi.
‘The manager has a new customer,’ Faisal said, being careful with his words.
‘He is alive?’ asked Saladin.
‘The manager is moving him to the gas station.’
‘When?’
‘Not now,’ Faisal said, and hung up the call.
Redford sat back and thought about what she had just heard. She was pretty certain that the ‘new customer’ had to be a reference to Mason. So Mason was alive? That was good news. But her assumption had been wrong about Saladin. He wasn’t passing information to Faisal, if anything it sounded like the other way around. And if the ‘manager’ was Shahlai, then it was coming from the top. The obvious question was where was the ‘gas station’, but the bigger one was why was Faisal telling Saladin all this?
Suddenly, the light on her screen blinked again. This time Saladin was making an outgoing call, but the number he was calling was not showing. Whoever it was had a line that was encrypted well enough to hold off the CCI hack.
She opened a second line direct to one of the CCI guys at Langley.
‘You seeing this?’ she asked.
‘Yup.’ She recognised the voice on the other end of the line as Agent Shotton, a twenty-five-year-old hotshot from Texas, recruited from MIT. ‘The number he’s calling has some pretty good encryption software. Whoever it is has some serious tech behind them.’
‘Can you break it?’ Redford checked the screen, the call was still live.
‘Hold up,’ Shotton said. Redford could hear the sound of her fingers tapping frantically on the keys. ‘You ain’t gonna like this.’
‘What?’
‘It’s US-registered and it’s got military-grade encryption. Gonna need more time.’
‘Where in the US?’
‘Fuck.’ Shotton went quiet for a moment. ‘No, it’s overseas.’
‘Where?’
‘One second, let me try something.’
Redford began to pack up her things. Wherever that phone was, she was going to find it.
Shotton came back on the call. ‘London. I’m running a more accurate trace but…’ Shotton’s tapping became almost deafening. ‘Okay. So, the Savoy Hotel?’
‘Can you access the hotel log?’
‘Sure.’ Agent Shotton easily hacked into the Savoy’s system, passing unobserved through the back door from where she could scan the database for guests.
‘It’s a suite. Booked by Southerlin Webber out of Arlington,’ Shotton sounded pleased with herself.
Redford wrote down the details. ‘Keep working it. I want a route in if he calls it again.’
‘I’ll do what I can. We got ears on it 24/7 so as soon as he goes live, you’ll know. You gonna be there?’
‘No.’ Redford was already up on her feet. ‘I’ll be in London.’
Eighteen
Al Hudaydah, Yemen
Faisal Ahadi squatted over the long-drop toilet and swatted away a fly before he lifted his head and checked again that he was alone. Satisfied that nobody else was there, he quickly scrolled through his phone, opened the settings menu and ran a full restore-factory-settings reboot. It was the fastest way to erase all the device’s data as well as remove its software—software that he had just used to speak with Saladin in Sana’a. He was confident that nobody would ever be able to trace his number back to the call, but still he never wanted to have to explain why he was running the latest end-to-end encryption tech on his phone. When it was rebooted, restored to new, Faisal pulled up his pants, pocketed the device and left the latrine.
Faisal was Iranian by birth but was educated for most of his life in the UK. It was in the West Midlands where he experienced first-hand the low-level everyday racist intolerance of the British people. He heard white men shout ‘Go back to where you came from!’ out of cars that passed him in the street, and the older boys at school often called him ‘Paki’, not caring that he came from Iran. As a result, the young Faisal never quite felt as though he fit in, and so instead he withdrew to focus on his studies. He kept his head down, worked hard and achieved good grades. He received a place to study computer engineering at Imperial College, London, and went on to win a generous industry scholarship to support him there. His parents had been so proud, even more so when he achieved a first-class degree and then an MSc in Cyber Security.
But he had astonished them when, at twenty-two and newly graduated, he announced that he’d decided to return to Iran to do his two years national military service, as all Iranian-born males over the age of eighteen are required by law to do. As a student, he’d been able to defer that responsibility, but once he graduated, the letter arrived from Tehran demanding that he return to the land of his birth and do his duty. Of course, nobody in his family had ever expected Faisal to go. He had already been offered a lucrative job in the US with the company who had sponsored his degree. But when the young man insisted, they realised that his mind was made up. His mother wept for a week. His father offered to put up ten thousand dollars to bribe him out of the obligation. But in the end, Faisal convinced them that, as an Iranian man, who wanted to one day travel freely in the country of his birth and maybe even return with a wife, he really had no choice. Reluctantly they conceded, and Faisal’s father bought his son a one-way ticket to Tehran.
Life in the old country was initially a shock to the young man from England. As a resident of the West, Faisal had learned that society served selfish endeavour and celebrated wanton excess, but in his motherland, he saw how Iran offered an alternative. He applied the same devotion to his military duties as he had done to his studies and he began to practice his faith more assiduously. He prayed five times a day, something which he had never done in Coventry or London. Slowly, he had felt happy in Iran with the choice he had made.
Twelve months into his conscription, he surprised everyone again when, with the encouragement of his sergeant major, he volunteered to apply for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. He passed the gruelling selection process with ease and went on to become a new recruit in Iran’s elite fighting force. That was when he came to the attention of VAJA, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Operating secretly from within Iran, VAJA was responsible for gathering and analysing intelligence both inside and outside of the country. A sort of FBI, NSA and CIA all rolled into one. It reported directly to the minister of intelligence, who reported solely to the prime minister. VAJA also took the lead role in organising and conducting terrorist operations, espionage and assassinations around the world, working closely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on operational matters.
So when VAJA were informed that a talented young graduate from London had also finished top of his class in selection, they became very interested. Which is to say, very suspicious. Three days later, Faisal was lifted from his barracks by two VAJA agents and taken in for questioning. Within Iran, VAJA operate several prisons independent of government scrutiny, where it is said the most violent and brutal acts of torture ever carried out happen routinely. Suspected enemies of the state, such as religious heretics, outspoken journalists, political dissidents, and in Faisal’s case, potential spies, are all welcome.
For fourteen days and nights, the young man from Coventry was subjected to relentless questioning by interrogators who engaged in a regimen of barbaric mental torture techniques. They kept him sleep deprived, starved and freezing cold. They forced him to repeat over and over the details of his background, family history and scholastic record. They questioned his Islamic faith as well as his motivations for returning to Iran. Again and again, Faisal repeated his story to the letter, remaining consistent and level, not once raising his voice or losing his temper. Eventually, satisfied that the cross-examination was complete, the agents took him back to barracks.
No report on Faisal Ahadi was ever filed with the Ministry of Intelligence, but one of the VAJA agents who had conducted the investigation did put in a telephone call to assure his commanding officer that Faisal had been thoroughly screened as per his request. The CO thanked the agent for his good work and reiterated that the matter should remain between them. The commanding officer’s name was General Ruak Shahlai.
A month later, when he had fully recovered from his ordeal, Faisal was once again pulled from barracks. Only this time, he was told he was not being sent to a VAJA prison but instead being assigned to join a special detail led by General Shahlai. Faisal was told to pack his belongings because the following day he would be flying to Yemen.
A year later, the same Faisal Ahadi walked out of a toilet in Yemen, pulling up the zipper of his uniform, knowing that he had become the closest thing that General Ruak Shahlai had to a confidant. The man whom he had, to be frank, feared for a long time, not least for his uncommon cruelty and brutality, had taken to using him as his sounding board as well as trusting him to run his communications with Tehran. Faisal knew everything about the general, including the fact that a single word from him could end Faisal’s life in a heartbeat. He knew that because his life depended on knowing it, because conversations like the one that he had just had in the latrine, for example, would be enough to have him tortured and executed.
What the agents of VAJA had never discovered was that Faisal Ahadi was indeed a spy. Not in a James Bond sense. He had never parachuted out of a jet or slept with a Russian double agent. He didn’t work for a government or even a branch of the secret services. No, Faisal Ahadi worked for the same company who had sponsored him to study at university. Since he had first written to thank them for their support and their kind job offer, but also to reluctantly inform them of his decision to return to Iran, they had been nothing but supportive. They had written back, assuring him that his position would remain open for as long as he needed it. They even paid his salary into his UK bank account every month and all they had asked for in return was that he ‘stay in touch’. Unfortunately for Faisal Ahadi, that was where his problems began.
Initially, ‘staying in touch’ had meant replying to an occasional text message. He was assigned a ‘boss’, a woman who sent him everyday questions about his well-being and how he was settling in. At first, it was nice to have someone to talk to about how his training was proceeding, how the army were treating him or how he was feeling. He’d enjoyed having someone knowledgeable to speak to about what equipment he was being trained on or where he was being stationed. In return, she explained to him that the company were happy with his progress, how important it was that he was getting real-life experience in the field, which would all be useful to him later in his career. Everything seemed so innocent that he hadn’t even questioned it. As a cyber security graduate, of course he knew the importance of encrypting those messages and conversations. But then he encrypted the messages he sent to everyone.
Things changed when he was taken in by VAJA. The agents had been fixated on Faisal’s motives for being in Iran, suspicious of his links to the West. It was only then that Faisal had realised two things. First, that his correspondence with the company could land him in serious trouble. Second, that the agents in VAJA didn’t seem to know anything about it. So he’d buried the conversations with the company deep down inside of himself and vowed to leave them there. He told the truth about everything else, about how he was committed to being a good soldier and serving the country of his birth. That was all true. He had been stupid to answer all those text messages, but the most important thing now was that nobody ever found out about them.
