"Do you remember a report you wrote nine months ago?" Goldman asked as they parked the golf cart and passed another security checkpoint. " 'Use of Intelligence/Strike Assets in Certain Middle East Field Operations,' I think you called it."
"Yes, sir. That was one I did for your office. Using SEAL Teams for deep-ashore intel gathering and hostage-rescue ops in Lebanon. I never heard anything else, and assumed it was shitcanned."
"It wasn't. It was going the rounds of various desks in
Special Ops, at Langley, even at the White House, but nothing much was happening. At least, not until Terry Waite vanished."
Terry Waite. Gordon knew the name well, of course, since much of his work in the last year had concerned the hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A no-win situation if ever there'd been one.
Ever since 1982, the Iranian-backed, pro-Palestinian extremists that called themselves Hezbollah, the Party of God, had been collecting hostages in Lebanon. The well-remembered ploy by Iran in holding fifty-two American embassy personnel for 444 days while a horrified world watched must have been considered a success in terrorist circles, because they'd made a career of kidnapping foreigners, especially Americans. Some had been held for five years, now, and the American public — and Congress — was growing increasingly angry and frustrated. In an apparent replay of the Vietnam tragedy a generation before, the American giant was being held impotent by a tiny and dedicated group of terrorist-revolutionaries.
Hezbollah claimed to be taking hostages to protest the treatment of fellow Shi'ite fundamentalists in Lebanon, and to win the release of Shi'ite terrorists now in prison in Israel. There were few options in dealing with them. Israel flatly refused to bargain with terrorists under any conditions… as did most in the American military. The hostages were held in scattered and well-concealed locations, and even discovering where they were was a major problem for the U.S. intelligence agencies tasked with finding them. An all-out, overt military strike was likely to result in the death of at least some of the hostages, in friendly-fire incidents, or when they were executed by a vengeful Shi'ite militia. The only alternative seemed to be to wait and hope for a break… while year after year slipped by, with American citizens imprisoned for no crime other than being Americans.
Terry Waite had offered an unexpected hope. An envoy from the Church of England, he'd presented himself to the Muslim fundamentalists as a neutral negotiator hoping to end the standoff that threatened the delicate balance of conflicting powers throughout the Middle East, a standoff that was unfairly painting all Shi'ites worldwide as terrorist, hostage-taking madmen. Over the course of several months, he'd won freedom for three hostages. Twenty-three remained imprisoned, however… eight Americans, one Indian, two Saudis, and eleven Europeans.
Then, in January of this year, Terry Waite himself had vanished… another hostage for Hezbollah demands.
"What's so important about Waite?" Gordon wanted to know. "Just the fact that he was so high-profile?"
"There's more to it than that. Here we are."
Goldman ushered him into a door flanked by Marine sentries, through a carpeted anteroom, and past another set of doors. Inside was a combat command center setup much like that aboard an Aegis cruiser, a technology-cluttered room filled with computer displays, TV monitors, communications consoles, and dozens of men, civilians and military, speaking in low-voiced tones.
Several men looked up from the display monitor they were studying. One, a young man with a long face, in shirtsleeves, frowned. "Who's this? What's he doing here?"
"Commander Gordon," Goldman said. "He's the gentleman who first conceived this op. I thought he should be here."
"Welcome to the Bunker, Commander," the young man said. His ramrod posture, his crisp manner made it clear he was military, even though he was casually attired in civvies.
"Thank you, sir."
"This is Marine Lieutenant Colonel North," Goldman said. "Former National Security Council aide. He's also had something to do with this scenario tonight."
"Colonel North?" Gordon said, shaking the man's hand.
"Yes, that Colonel North." He sounded tired.
The previous November, a Lebanese newspaper had printed a story declaring that the Reagan administration had sold high-tech missiles to Iran in a bizarre-sounding ploy to free the hostages held by pro-Iranian Shi'ite guerrillas in Lebanon. Weeks later, Attorney General Edwin Meese had dropped a bigger bomb: American officials had taken the money from the missile sales and diverted it — illegally, as it turned out, under the terms of the 1984 Boland Amendment — to the anti-Sandanista contras of Nicaragua. If President Reagan was directly involved, he could easily be impeached.
Meese had added, however, that the entire operation had been run by one man working on his own in the White House basement, a "loose cannon," as Meese put it, named Oliver North….
North had been fired. His boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, had resigned, but ongoing investigations by Congress and a special prosecutor were turning up new pieces of the story daily, including involvement by the NSC, the CIA, and members of the president's cabinet, including Vice President Bush, a former CIA director. It looked like North was going to be subpoenaed to testify before Congress soon.
The fact that North still had security clearance for this place, that he was here in the Pentagon at all, spoke volumes.
The Marine must have read the thoughts behind Gordon's eyes. "Operation Free Sanction has been in the works since last year," he said. "I wasn't going to jump ship now. Not with so much at stake…. "
"Free Sanction?"
"Your plan, Commander," a Navy captain, whose name was Rafferty, said. He pointed at the big-screen display. "It's going down as we speak."
Gordon looked at the screen. His mouth gaped. There, in green light of varying shades, was an aerial view of rugged terrain, and a massive building or fortification of some kind. He could see people there, too, dozens of them inside the big structure … many of them visible through the walls and roofs of interior buildings.
And in the bottom left corner of the screen, fourteen men, heavily armed, were just moving into view.
"Ah, Starbase, Alfa," a voice said from a wall speaker. It sounded like the man was whispering, but the volume, kicked high, turned the whisper to a near shout. "In position, Waypoint Three. Objective in sight."
"Roger that, Alfa," an Army major with a communications headset said, cupping his needle mike. "You are go for execute."
"Starbase, Alfa, copy."
"My God," Gordon said, awed. "This is really happening? Right now?"
"It's happening," North said. "Welcome to the Bekaa Valley, Commander. You might not have known it, but you… and they are about to make history tonight!"
"My God," Lieutenant (j.g.) Kenneth Randall said, peering through the night-sight binoculars at the mammoth construction squatting on the hillside a hundred meters ahead. "It's a frigging fortress."
He'd known what it would look like, thanks to the training runs, but seeing it here, for real… it brooded over the Bekaa Valley like a squat, ancient gray monster.
"It was, once," Lieutenant Gerald Gallagher whispered beside him. "The Ottoman Turks built the place a hundred fifty years ago. It's seen better days, though."