The issue before him, however, was even more serious. High-grade heroin was now showing up in California, Oregon, Washington, and other neighboring states. It was a new and very serious aspect to the problem. Agent Stanley Hagen, of the Seattle FBI field office, had been particularly aggressive about the issue during their telephone call earlier that day.
“And now heroin is coming into the US through BC,” Hagen had literally shouted into the phone. “Load after load after damn dump-truck load of high-grade marijuana, and now, and now HEROIN!” He had seen many good kids go sideways because of marijuana; he didn’t want to think about the added criminality that came with the more serious use of heroin yet. He was going to take it up with the State department, he said. He was going to DC with this. It had to stop.
Indy knew Hagen was right. Indy also had a reasonably good idea about what would happen next. The FBI would lean on State. State would lean on its Canadian Embassy, who would start a chain of events that would end with the Inspector General of the RCMP proceeding to shit on Indy and his colleagues. Indy’s protestations about low budgets, lax laws, and easy courts with dope-smoking judges would simply fall on deaf ears.
The evidence Hagen presented to Indy seemed clear enough. The heroin coming into the United States was from the Middle East or the golden triangle of Southeast Asia. And it was repeatedly showing up in raids of marijuana wholesalers in the state of Washington. That meant that the same hands were involved. It was coming over the BC/Washington border somehow. Somewhere. But where? And how?
The convoy came at the expected time. An old Humvee. An even older Volvo N86. And another Humvee. The vehicles came rumbling down the Al Jawf Highway in Libya, surreal in the shimmering bands of heat. “Highway” was a bit of a misnomer, since the road was only a rutted single lane trail, often disappearing completely beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara. The heat and the late afternoon sun were unrelenting. Without water, no human could last more than two days in this environment. Abu bin Mustafa was born in Egypt, but on the Nile delta. He had spent years in the deserts of Yemen and Afghanistan, but still found the endless sandy solitude of the southern Sahara to be unnerving.
He shifted from one foot to the other, pulling his attention off his thirst. “This should be easy,” he told himself, speaking aloud simply to break the heavy silence. Just get the job done and he could get on a plane and have all the water and air conditioning he wanted. The location was perfect for an ambush — the roadway descended slightly, and rounded a sharp curve. Mustafa had his men park their Toyotas across the road, where they would be least visible. Then he and the three others assumed positions behind the rock formations that rose up on both sides of the highway. The sun’s position was in their favor. There would be ten, he’d been told. Four in the lead vehicle, two in the Volvo, and four more in the third vehicle. Three American soldiers. Seven Libyan soldiers. Mustafa and his men communicated through collar microphones, and each carried a Heckler and Koch PSG-1, equipped with a 6x Hensoldt scope. The rifles were extremely accurate, auto-loading, and equipped with 20-round magazines. The ammunition used had also been modified to maximize the weapons’ killing power. The modifications were not popular, because of the expense, but that had never deterred Mustafa’s employer, who was the mastermind behind the attack. Mustafa drew a breath and gave the count as the vehicles drew to within firing range.
At Mustafa’s signal, four rifles cracked as one. Four soldiers keeled over, dead. Two soldiers in the last Humvee and the two soldiers in the Volvo were hit. Within a split second, four rifles fired again. The two soldiers left in the trailing Humvee slumped over. Two soldiers in the lead Humvee were hit. One more split second reload. As the two remaining soldiers in the lead Humvee rolled out of their vehicle, attempting to gain some cover, they were also killed. Mustafa was astounded at the ease of it. It was just as Yousseff, his boss, had said to him more than once. Preparation was everything.
The men rose as one and headed down to the vehicles. Barking a quick command at the others to check the bodies, Mustafa pulled back the tarp slung over the Volvo’s deck and smiled as he saw row upon row of what appeared to be reddish cellophane-wrapped bricks. Again, it was as Yousseff had told him. The two old Humvees were driven off the road and parked behind the same rock formations that had hidden Mustafa and his men. The bodies were pulled out of the Volvo and placed in the Humvees, and the Volvo, with its valuable cargo, was turned around. A new convoy formed, this time heading north — a Toyota in front, a Toyota in the rear, and the Volvo with the Semtex in the middle. Mustafa rode shotgun in the Volvo.
The three vehicles raced northward as quickly as the tattered roadway allowed, and within an hour turned right, heading east on a barely visible goat-path of a road that serviced, occasionally, the desert village of Zighan. Another five miles, and a decrepit, weatherworn building came into view. Behind it sat a few single-engine craft and a reconditioned DC-3. It had taken Mustafa and his colleagues several days to find this isolated and rarely used airport, and a goodly sum of money to cover the bribe that would permit them to take off without a flight plan. When they arrived, the Volvo was backed up to the DC-3, and the four men worked quickly to transfer the bricks, row by row, to the cargo compartment of the plane. This would be the first of many transfers. Mustafa saw the airport manager watching the process with interest. Not a good sign.
The sun had set by the time the task was finished. Mustafa ordered his sweating men to board their plane. He went back into the tiny terminal, and smiled at the master. He didn’t like this part of the job, and wished one of Yousseff’s paid assassins had been sent along to take care of it. The stationmaster appeared friendly, with lines of laughter circling his eyes. But he had seen too much, hadn’t he? Yousseff hated loose ends, and would commend his judgment. When he was four feet from the man, Mustafa pulled out his 9 mm Glock and shot him once in the head. One more bullet in the heart for good measure, and that was that.
One of the other men had already started the engines of the DC-3 when Mustafa reached it, and within minutes the plane, loaded down with 4,300 kilos of Semtex, was on a southeastern course, headed toward the Sudan. Mustafa reached for the Thuraya Sat-phone.
Three thousand miles and several time zones to the east, in a large hangar in Jalalabad, a phone was ringing. Three times, then a pause, then twice more. Then silence. It was the signal. Yousseff smiled to himself, setting down what he had been reading and leaning back in his chair. The plan was in motion, and there would be no turning back now.
A mile or so downriver from the hangar, Zak Goldberg was making his first transmission in a week, using the tiny transmitter engineered by the propeller heads at Langley. Smaller than a matchbox, it contained only two buttons — an on/off switch and a Morse code communication button for sending out an encrypted Morse code signal. More than 90 percent of the device was battery. When turned on, it transmitted its position to one of the several unmanned Global Hawks cruising 60,000 feet above him; they in turn transmitted the position, and the Morse code message, to the US Embassy in Islamabad. The Morse code was translated to alphanumeric characters, and printed out on a high-speed printer located in the communications room in the Embassy’s basement. When this newest message came in, the clerk on duty glanced at it, yawning. Then he snapped to attention and read it quickly, and wide-eyed, a second time. It was no fine judgment call in this case to ring Michael Buckingham, the CIA station chief. This information needed to be passed along immediately. He picked up the telephone and quickly dialed Buckingham’s local number.