Ri contacted his non-official cover officers in Mexico who worked with the Maldonado cartel, and they confirmed they thought it likely he could be persuaded to support an assassination attempt on the American President. Santiago was a drug-addled, nihilistic maniac, according to Ri’s officers, and if Santiago harbored any concerns for his own self-preservation he didn’t show them. Moreover, he would have absolutely no qualms about sending his own cultlike followers to a slaughter if there was the chance to exact retribution for the man responsible for his brother’s death.
But the North Koreans quickly realized that although Maldonado had men and guns, his force was unskilled, and he had no way to assassinate the President of the United States.
General Ri decided that the Mexican cartel could, however, still play a crucial role in the operation, because Ri knew where to find the killer.
He looked to another piece of the puzzle after he fleshed out the idea he had relayed to the Dae Wonsu. The general himself spoke with a close confidant who formerly was the head of Syria’s General Security Directorate, but had gone into hiding in North Africa during the war. Ri let the man know he was looking for someone who could work independently and be involved in a high-level assassination. The Syrian did not ask about the target, since he knew Ri would not tell him. Instead, he accepted a finder’s fee to give Ri the contact information for a single bomb maker, a man who, so said the Syrian, was both abundantly talented and looking for a way out of his present circumstance.
Ri was surprised to see the contact was not Syrian himself. He was Iranian, but he worked independently of Tehran; in fact, he’d freelanced as a bomb maker for the last few years. Ri contacted the Syrian government and asked for the opportunity to hire the man for some training in North Korea. They were open to the idea, and they arranged a meeting.
Adel Zarif lived in a Syrian intelligence safe house in Damascus, the city in which the Iranian had been living for more than three years. There was a price on his head by both Hezbollah and the Free Syrian Army rebels, and rumors were he was on an American presidential kill list as well.
Hezbollah wanted him dead for leaving their fold and turning freelance, the FSA wanted him dead for killing hundreds of their fighters in the civil war, and American drones combed the world for him because of the years he spent in Iraq, training insurgents in his specialty.
The improvised explosive device.
Zarif disagreed with the term; to him there was nothing improvised about his explosive devices. He had studied electrical engineering in Tehran before becoming a Hezbollah operative; in the nineties he’d wired bombs for Hezbollah and built bomb vests for Palestinian terrorists in southern Lebanon. When the war came to Iraq he was already in the country, already working with the Shiite militias, and Hezbollah pulled him back home for further training and study of tactics to defeat American armor. He came up with ingenious low-tech ways to build and employ explosively formed penetrator weapons, a normally high-tech device that shapes metal projectiles by the blast of the explosive, sending them through steel like a knife through butter.
He destroyed his first American tank in 2005, and by 2007, a year in which 33,900 IED attacks took place against coalition forces in Iraq, Zarif had trained hundreds of bomb makers in his tactics.
He was moved to Afghanistan in 2011 by Hezbollah, and there he built his largest IED. He wired a two-thousand-pound bomb to a detonator and placed it in the back of a water truck. A martyr then drove it into Kandahar, and made it to within one hundred yards of a British base before he was shot dead by a sniper’s bullet. He then let go of the dead man’s switch, detonating the device and killing seventy-six, all but five of them local.
By the time of the Arab Spring and the civil wars throughout the region Zarif was in his late forties, and he was old enough to see he was being used as a tool by different sects, beliefs, tribes, and factions. He decided his only true allegiance was to himself, and he went freelance.
The Syrian government snatched him up, both to help their forces build booby traps in the cities they fled in order to escape the FSA and to take him off the market so that he did not fight against them. The relationship was transactional, he didn’t care for the Assad regime any more than he cared for the people he blew to bits with his IEDs. But soon he was with Assad’s 17th Division, wiring entire buildings to blow on trip wires and lining roads behind the division’s retreat with car bombs.
His reputation grew in Syria, and the world’s intelligence organizations located him through his actions. Soon it became clear he could not leave Damascus because of all the parties who wanted him dead.
Ri’s agents met him at his safe house, and they revealed they weren’t there to talk about a training trip to North Korea. Instead, they proposed the plan to transport him to Mexico City, link him up with agents of a local group there, and to provide him with all the intelligence and material he needed to kill the U.S. President. After he succeeded, he would then be secreted out of the country by North Korean agents and taken either back to Syria if he wanted or, better yet, to North Korea, where he would live all of the rest of his days feeling the warmth of a grateful nation. The agents showed him pictures on their tablet computer of his future home, a palace on the beaches near the city of Hamhung, along with photos of beautiful young girls, any of which he could choose as his own to be his wife.
Zarif wanted out of Syria, and he saw this Mexico City operation as his best bet. But he did not agree to it outright. He knew his only chance to make it to the beautiful beaches and live like a king in a palace was success in his mission and the absolute deniability that either he or North Korea had any involvement. He peppered the agents with technical questions and he demanded to go to North Korea to meet with the leadership there.
Ri did not like this, but he saw no choice.
Although the Syrian government had all but held their best bomb maker like a prisoner for the past few years, North Korean intelligence officers persuaded Zarif’s handlers to give him travel documents to leave the country. The North Koreans said they wanted to bring Zarif to Pyongyang to train their direct-action forces in how to make explosively formed penetrator bombs, and while there, North Koreans would in turn give him access to recently acquired high-tech South Korean communications equipment. This knowledge would help him keep up with advances in remote detonators. Working in Syria, he’d had little access to new equipment, and the DPRK convinced the Syrian government that a short trip for Zarif would be in Syria’s best interests.
The ruse was a lie, of course. Zarif would travel to Mexico, he would kill the President of the United States, and he would then retire to the ocean side in North Korea.
Or so Zarif had been led to believe.
Zarif was transported to Pyongyang the next day, where he met with Ri and others, and when he showed reluctance to agree to the plan — he was unsure of the efficiency of the Mexicans and the credibility of their intelligence — he was flown to Hamhung and shown his future home.
The palace existed, it was stately and impressive, and the beautiful girls were lined up at the entryway to meet him. Adel Zarif was sold.
In truth, the mansion was one of many properties for use by the Supreme Leader, and General Ri had no plans to call the Dae Wonsu and tell him he was offering up his home to a foreign Muslim assassin.
No. As Adel Zarif smiled and shook Ri’s hand on the tarmac in Pyongyang, anxious to leave North Korea to head to Mexico to begin preparations for the biggest operation of his career, the sad, hangdog eyes of General Ri brightened for a moment, and he smiled back. The man before him would die during the execution of Operation Fire Axe, and no one in the world would know Zarif had ever been here.