But Gogolov's mission wasn't to set in motion a wave of democratic capitalism throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Far from it. Gogolov's vision was to restore the glory of Mother Russia, to cleanse her of the capitalist pigs who let mafia bosses and prostitutes run rampant in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to make her a force the world not just feared but worshipped.
To succeed — to reemerge as the world's only superpower and leave the Americans gasping for oxygen — Russia would need to be purified of President Grigoriy Vadim, the whore who ran the country now. He was driving the country's economy into the sewer. He was allowing the army to disintegrate for a lack of funding and expansionist missions. He was allowing Russia's nuclear arsenal to be systematically dismantled. And he was too cozy with the West, with Washington in particular, but also with the Jews. Russia was no longer a superpower. It could barely be considered a world power at all. Indeed, it was in danger of imploding in a thousand ancient ethnic feuds. The festering rebellion in Chechnya was symptomatic of just how feckless the New Russia really was under Vadim's limp hand. It was time to reverse the decline before it was too late, before Russia was an in ternational laughingstock of bread lines and beggars.
Reviving the Great Russian Empire would not happen overnight. It would take time, leadership, and luck. It would require assassinating President Va dim, no small venture. It would require mounting a putsch — a coup — against Vadim's government and the spineless thieves in the Duma. And once Vadim was gone, then things would really get difficult.
Russia would need hard currency. Massive amounts of hard currency. For that she would need to control the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf. She would need to combine this with her own oil and natural gas reserves. She'd need to control warm-water ports in the south, and the shipping lines used to move the oil to all points east and west. That, in turn, would require an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It was no small undertaking. But it was a goal worthy of their sacrifice. A Russian-Persian axis — a nuclear alliance that was virtually immune from challenge by the United States, NATO, or a newly defanged Iraq — this was precisely the goal for which Gogolov and Jibril were plotting their strategy and making their moves.
They weren't in a hurry. They understood full well that there were pieces on the chess board that needed to be moved around before they put the king in checkmate. But they also knew they weren't simply playing chess against Grigoriy Vadim. They were playing against James "Mac" MacPherson. And now against Jonathan Meyers Bennett. They were up against two idealists, two men infecting the Arab world with Western visions of "free men, free minds, and free markets."
And it was clear. They must be stopped.
Gogolov picked up the telephone and dialed Mohammed Jibril's private digital cell phone number. It was the wee hours of the morning, too early for either of them. But this could not wait. It was time to counter Mac-Pherson's move. It was time to get back on the offensive. It was time to force the Israelis to invade the West Bank and Gaza, douse all this talk of freedom and democracy, and reignite the fires of jihad.
Bennett never heard it.
The black phone on the desk in Ziegler's private quarters rang twelve annoying times. But Bennett was still sound asleep on the couch. A disoriented Erin McCoy, startled out of her own nap in the chair beside him, finally managed to grab the receiver on the thirteenth ring. It was Jake Zie-gler, calling from the main control room.
Yes, he was well aware of the fact that it was only 2:19 a.m. Tuesday morning. But back in Washington it was only 7:19 p.m. Monday evening. The president was about to begin another secure videoconference with his National Security Council and he wanted Bennett and McCoy to join them immediately.
By this point, everyone on the NSC knew what the president was thinking. They knew he was considering sending forces in not just to rescue Bennett's team and any DSS agents out there that might still be alive but also end the Palestinian civil war and bring some semblance of order to the dis puted territories. Their staffs were feverishly working on a range of tactical military options, target packages, intelligence needs, and subsequent diplo-matic scenarios. But the president knew none of them were ready to talk details yet. This meeting, therefore, was to talk about strategy, not tactics. Specifically, if the United States went in, what geopolitical objectives would they want to achieve? What could they achieve? More to the point, should the United States back any one of the factional leaders now battling it out in the streets of Palestine? Could one of them reasonably be able to become a U.S. partner for peace?
For this the president turned to Erin McCoy. The president had known McCoy all her life and he trusted her judgment. Over the past thirty-one years, he'd not only watched her grow up, he'd seen her emerge as one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most effective operatives, following in her late father's footsteps.
When Erin had graduated as an Arabic specialist from the Defense Lan-guage Institute, the MacPhersons flew out to Monterrey, California, to cel ebrate with her. When she'd completed the CIA's Arab-language undercover training program in Casablanca, they met her in Paris to celebrate at her favorite Moroccan restaurant. When she'd been chosen for the "Bennett as signment," MacPherson had personally grilled her for hours until he was satisfied beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could handle the job. And now she was all grown up, and he wanted her assessment of the situation. "Erin, there aren't too many people who have a better idea of what I'm hoping to accomplish and the facts on the ground than you do," MacPherson began. "So here's what I need. Give me your take on who could end up replacing Arafat, and if there's anyone in particular we should get behind, Now, I'm operating under the assumption — based on all of our meetings prior to the trip — that we're not inclined to trust one of Arafat's longtime political cronies, be it Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi, or one of the major Fatah leaders. But I don't really know much about these factional leaders waging the war right now — Dahlan or Rajoub or that other guy." "Barghouti?"
"Exactly. I mean, who are these guys? Are any of them are actually capable of making peace when the dust settles?"
TWENTY-ONE
McCoy wasn't quite sure where to begin.
She knew the dossiers on these guys inside and out. Ever since the CIA had assigned her to work on Bennett's team and the Medexco deal began gaining steam, she'd made it her mission to become an expert on all things Palestinian. But the president wasn't asking for factoids. He was asking for her assessment of their character and their potential for leadership.
McCoy asked Ziegler for a glass of water, and then began her narrative with the leading "candidate" to succeed Arafat, and perhaps the most powerful man in Palestine at the moment — Mohammed Dahlan.
Dahlan, she explained, served as head of the Palestinian Preventative Security Forces in Gaza from 1995 through 2002, resigned to go into business and make money for a few years, and then came back into government under Abu Mazen as head of all Palestinian security forces and effectively the "Interior Minister," though he didn't officially hold that title. Tall, dark, and dashing, with a dazzling smile and closely cropped black hair, Dahlan was married with three children. He was fluent in Hebrew, passable in English, had a huge power base in Gaza and the West Bank, and long fancied himself the rightful heir to Arafat, though he'd made a tactical decision to back Mazen when Arafat appointed Mazen as prime minister back in 2003.
Born in 1961, in a refugee camp in Gaza, Dahlan began life under the control of the Egyptian government. He was six in June of 1967 when the Israelis won the Six Day War. From that point on, he lived under Israeli occupation and thus began a deep and passionate hatred of the Israelis. As a teenager, he joined Arafat's Fatah, the armed political base of the PLO, began launching terrorist attacks against the Israeli Defense Forces, and eventually rose to become a commander of operations for Fatah. Between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays, Dahlan was arrested ten times by the Israelis, That's where he learned fluent Hebrew, in Israeli prisons.