LANGLEY, VA - Intelligence Analyst Harun al-Rashid’s job was to listen into phone intercepts coming from the Middle East that were suspected of having terrorist origins. Al-Rashid represented the first line of defense against terrorist attacks, at home and abroad. A first generation American, al-Rashid’s parents immigrated to the United States from Palestine before his birth.
An analysis of millions of phone calls coming into and out of known hotspots for terrorism was tackled by a backend supercomputer called B.E.T.T.Y. It was powerful enough to translate and then analyze phone conversations for key words and phrases. It would then provide people like al-Rashid with a prioritized list of suspected phone conversations. The weight given keywords like “uranium,” or “C-4” moved them to the top of a list compared with words like “weapon,” or “rifle.”
Electronic surveillance was monotonous work, but occasionally had its rewards. This year alone, al-Rashid discovered communications that led to the ruin of Hamas-backed attempts to destroy several American embassies abroad. The terrorists were tracked down and wiped out before they had time to implement their plans. Each day he would hear hundreds of possible terrorist conversations. His job was to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Activity picked up in the past several of years, just after President McKinley left office. It was mid-afternoon and he was working through a backlog of phone intercepts when his eyes caught a term usually used by intelligence services from around the world, by both good and bad guys.
“Trojan,” or “Trojan Horse,” was a moniker used by covert operators to describe any of a number of weapons that could be easily disguised. They were terms that were almost exclusively used to reference weapons with mass-destructive capabilities, WMD's.
Al-Rashid listened to a portion of a recorded conversation where “Trojan” was used to verify his suspicions. The specialist heard the voice of a man. The voice of the man was speaking in Arabic, but the dialect was not familiar.
Could be Yemeni, or Kurd.
Al-Rashid listened to a phrase in which the word of most interest was mentioned.
“In need of Trojans that can fly.”
The word “fly” meant an airborne attack, a dirty bomb, or chemical weapon. It was very unusual for a would-be terrorist to ever use those words unless he was in special forces.
It must be a ‘third world’ variety.
No special forces members in any superpower’s military would ever enunciate those words in the clear like that. They were only ever thought to come up in face-to-face conversations, so the terms represented a big ‘red flag.’ Something, however, did not make sense. The CIA agent backed up the recording to the beginning.
Arab speaking man: “How did you get this number?”
Altered voice: “That is not important. I have a buyer in need of Trojans that can fly. They will pay in gold.”
There was a long pause.
Arab speaking man: “Let me have a number where I can reach you.”
Disguised voice: “I am sorry, but I can’t do that. I will call you back at this number.”
Arab speaking man: “Four o’clock. This is going to be very expensive.”
Camouflaged voice: “Four o’clock.”
Al-Rashid took a look at the locations of the two calls. The disguised man's call originated in United Arab Emirates from a pay phone in the heart of Dubai. The call went to the Iranian Embassy in Syria.
The man who answered the phone call knew what “Trojan” and “fly” meant. The person at the Embassy had to be part of Iranian Special Forces, Quds Force.
Al-Rashid took a quick look at the Iranians who were identified in that Embassy. Two possibilities surfaced, both showed as being former Quds Force agents. It was one of them, Mustafa Wahbi, or Tariq bin Ziyad.
The CIA analyst looked at the time and date stamp.
Two days ago, damn backlog!
The level of chatter had prevented the specialist from catching this in time...to tap calls going into the embassy.
Al-Rashid wasn’t sure, but he believed he just missed a big opportunity. He picked up his phone and dialed his boss’s extension. “I think I’ve got something.”
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YEMEN - ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ (AQAP) was headquartered in the coastal town of Al-Ghaida where it directed the activities of terrorist cells abroad, including the United States. Its ties to the Quds Force made it a logical choice as a partner in Allen's plans.
Allen used a contact provided by ‘the Lebanese’ to make the arrangements. His name was Zafar Mahmood.
Posing as an envoy of an anonymous Saudi Prince, Mahmood set about making the appropriate overtures while Allen operated in the background. The story was, the Saudi Prince acquired a stash of chemical weapons from the Iranian arsenal and wanted to use them to strike a blow against the “Great Satan.”
Following a month of negotiation, Mahmood succeeded in winning the Al-Qaeda leadership’s confidence. They would carry out the attacks on targets inside the United States. They would send in a team that included former Americans to carry out the attacks. They would enter the United States through Mexico. The Prince would take care of smuggling the weapons into America. The two would come together in the suburbs of New York City. Allen knew the CIA was listening.
Today, the embargoed country of Iran found itself cash-strapped as it pursued its nuclear weapons development program. When heads of state for the former USSR no longer considered N-5 a useful deterrent, the Iranian regime procured the stockpile and were planning to use it to retaliate against Iraq. Now those deadly devices sat collecting dust, of little use, so the offer made by the black market weapons dealer was readily agreed to.
Each device was a three-cylinder design. The diameter of each cylinder was two and a half inches. The length sixteen inches. The titanium cylinders were welded to each other in a triangular arrangement. A band of thin sheet metal surrounded them, disguising their appearance and providing some measure of protection from puncture.
The three titanium cylinders were painted colors, two in red, one in white. The two inert agents were stored in the red colored cylinders. The white cylinder provided the air pressure to mix the two contents of the two red cylinders together to combine the lethal mixture. A timer triggering mechanism would start the chain reaction.
By design, the white cylinder could not be pressurized until the proper pass code was entered into a recessed push-button readout. Once that was carried out, an ordinary gas station air pump for filling a car tire could be used to charge the weapon. The secondary failsafe mechanism was a subsequent passcode the weapon required to initiate the timer. Without both unique codes, the weapon would remain inert, an un-fused bomb with nothing to start the chain reaction.
Allen confirmed through Mahmood the N-5 shipment made it out of the Port of Dubai arriving two months later in the Philippines after purposefully moving through half a dozen ports and shipping companies to lose any shadowing by intelligence services. There the containers were met by Karl Hagman.
The sixteen devices were then disguised to look like a red Class-B fire extinguisher and included in a shipment of several hundred that made its way to the port of Vancouver.
Three months after leaving Iran, the deadly contraband entered the North American continent and arrived on the loading dock of a fire equipment wholesaler in the Midwest, the “Made in Philippines” label emblazoned on the side of each fire extinguisher.
Internal Memo: Central Intelligence Agency
Recent chatter within some of the secondary channels between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda operating out of Yemen have come to the Agency's attention.
The increased communications coincide with a large gold bullion deposit into Swiss bank accounts controlled by the Iranian government. National Security Advisory has increased to threat level "Orange."
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AL-GHAIDA, YEMEN - The black market for weapons was an area
constantly under surveillance by every intelligence service in the world, American, Israeli, Chinese, Russian. Those in the trade, the black marketers, however, had become adept at leaving little if anything of a trail that could be later followed. That was at least true when it came to conventional weapons. When it came to WMDs, it was a different story. Governments were willing to pay extraordinary amounts to discover who was about to do what to who and with what.
The Yemeni Army raid on the suspected Al-Qaeda operations center was such an action. CIA interrogations of those captured alive alerted them to the possibility that chemical weapons may have moved through Yemeni ports to destinations abroad. The forensic group had to put together a few of the pieces from the shattered remains of the terrorist compound. The CIA called for the use of the special forces unit, SAD, to carry out the operation, but President Martinez saw fit to shut down the group as part of his administration’s war crimes investigation. The Yemen military used little care when taking the compound; the use of tank guns and RPG’s left much of the computer hardware in too many pieces to put together.
The raid, however, led to some important discoveries and the CIA was now pursuing those leads with the help of Interpol and Israeli Intelligence. All indications were that something was planned for the United States.
UNTHINKABLE OCCURS