With the windows of the Fiat down they could hear the low rumble of the crowd around front. So far the demonstration was peaceful, though no one thought that would last. The Taliban were attacking in a dozen or more spots around Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and possibly in other key cities, though information broadcast over television and radio was spotty at best. But the people were demanding that the government do something about it. The police and especially the army were nowhere to be seen. So far as the ordinary citizen knew the cowards had barricaded themselves inside their bases. Even the air force, which should have sent jets aloft to fire on the enemy, were absent from the skies.
They had gathered on Constitution Avenue and were marching on the Aiwan to demand President Barazani take control. Or at least give them reassurances that the government was doing something.
The people wanted someone to tell them that they were in charge. That Pakistan would survive. That their day-to-day lives would return to normal.
“Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Jura said. “I know that you work for the CIA and are here at the orders of your president, but what is the U.S. going to do for us this time?”
“Show you the way out of this situation,” Haaris said. He didn’t mind the question, not this late in the game.
“Are you bringing the military?”
“Pakistan’s answers are here, right in front of your nose, Lieutenant. And tonight you’ll understand.”
“Even the mob out front?”
“Especially them.”
Lieutenant Jura pulled up in front of a gatehouse at one of the rear entrances. Two armed soldiers in the uniforms of the president’s security service came out as Haaris stepped out of the Fiat, his nylon bag in hand.
“Good evening, sir,” the taller of the two guards greeted him respectfully. “Your driver will have to remain here, but one of the president’s aides will escort you upstairs.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you be requiring assistance with your bag?”
“I can manage,” Haaris said.
At that moment a man in a British-cut business suit appeared at the door. “The president is waiting for you.”
SIX
President of the United States Charlene Miller entered the White House Situation Room late in the afternoon, local, after getting off the phone with Walter Page, the director of the CIA. She was not in a good frame of mind, and combined with the fact she hadn’t taken the time to freshen her makeup made her look like the Wicked Witch of the North. But she didn’t give a shit. This was the first major crisis in her first year of office, and it was a whopper.
Everyone bunched around the long table were glued to the large flat-screen monitors on the wall, showing images of the mob in front of the Presidential Palace in Islamabad. Another monitor showed fires and explosions around the city, and in Rawalpindi about ten miles away the Army General Headquarters was under attack.
Miller took her place at the head of the table.
Her chief of staff, Thomas Broderick, nodded. “Madam President,” he said.
“What about David? Any word yet?” she asked.
“No demands have been made. But we’ve confirmed that he was taken on the way in from the airport.”
“I just got that from Walt Page.”
The others around the table — Secretary of Defense William Spencer, a retired three-star army general who’d been commandant of West Point until he’d been tapped by the president; Secretary of State John Fay, a tall, lean, almost ascetic man with a thick shock of white hair, who’d been Harvard’s dean and was undoubtedly the smartest and most liberal person in the room; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Harry S. Altman, a short man whom everyone thought looked and sounded like Harry Truman, and whose stewardship of the military was unparalleled in fifty years; and the president’s adviser on national security affairs, Susan Kalley, a former professor of geopolitical affairs from UCLA who was the first “out” lesbian (although her significant other remained closeted) ever to serve at such a high level of government, who looked like a movie star and was beloved of the media — all looked up.
Notably missing was Saul Santarelli, the director of National Intelligence, who was on his way back from Paris.
“The situation in Islamabad is becoming critical,” Kalley said.
“Is it possible that Barazani will fall?” Miller asked.
“It’s likely.”
“We may have another problem developing as well, Madam President,” Sec Def Spencer said. “Units of the army and the ISI have been moving nuclear warheads out of their secure storage depots.”
“As we expected they might. They’ve done it before.”
“A risky business. But we got a series of satellite shots of a civilian vehicle showing up at Quetta Air Force Base and leaving twenty minutes later. We managed to track it south on the highway through the town of Nushki — which is practically on top of the border with Afghanistan — until it parked alongside the road. NRO analysts think they may have picked up flashes from gunfire, and then nothing. The car — actually a SUV — is still at the side of the highway.”
“Do you think it picked up a nuclear warhead?” the president asked.
“We got lucky with a decent angle shot of the SUV before it reached Quetta and then afterwards. In the second series of images it was low on its springs, as if it were carrying something heavy.”
“And?”
“There’s been traffic leaving several other suspected nuclear weapons depots — at Chagai Hills, Issa Khel, Kahuta and Karachi. But we haven’t picked up any signs of trouble, and we can’t be certain that nuclear weapons were taken off those bases.”
“I saw part of that report,” the president said. “But have we followed any of those suspected vehicles — other than the one from Quetta — to their destinations?”
“We don’t have the resources,” Kalley said. “Neither does the CIA or NRO. Congress has cut their budgets the last three years in a row.” The National Reconnaissance Office was responsible for putting spy satellites in orbit and maintaining them.
Miller had been warned by her top advisers, including Spencer and Kalley, that one day the reduced funding of such a vital component of the intelligence apparatus would rise up and bite the U.S. in the ass. Which it had now. But after the Snowden debacle, which had resulted in the sharp curtailment of the National Security Agency’s ability to monitor telephone and computer traffic, Congress had been adamant that budget cuts across the board be made to the entire U.S. intel community. And it had been an issue that Miller, whose programs on poverty were most dear to her heart, and most expensive, wasn’t willing to go to the mat with Congress on.
“What do we actually have over Islamabad and Rawalpindi?” she asked.
“An enhanced KH-14,” Sec Def Spencer said. “It’s one of our best assets.”
“But not all-seeing,” Miller said.
She picked up the phone and called Walt Page at Langley. She got him in the Watch, which was the section just down the hall from his office where a half-dozen analysts working twelve hours on and twelve off were tied into every available intelligence resource. They were the only people who knew practically everything that was going on in the world in real time.
His image came up on one of the flat-screen monitors, the connection completely secure from any outside eavesdropping. Or it was at least as secure as intel technology, and the extremely complicated quantum effects algorithms of the CIA’s computer genius, Otto Rencke, could make it.