Joshua's Hammer Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  THE OPENING MOVES SUMMER

  ONE

  CIA Headquarters Langley, Virginia

  Office of Special Research

  TWO

  EPCOT Orlando, Florida

  THREE

  Georgetown

  Chevy Chase

  En Route to Langley

  FOUR

  CIA Headquarters

  FIVE

  The White House

  The Oval Office

  SARAH BIN LADEN

  SIX

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  SEVEN

  Out of Kabul

  EIGHT

  Into the Afghan Mountains

  NINE

  Osama bin Laden’s Camp

  TEN

  In the Afghan Mountains

  ELEVEN

  Bin Laden’s Camp

  CIA Headquarters

  CVN 70 Carl Vinson

  TWELVE

  In the Afghan Mountains

  Bin Laden’s Camp

  THIRTEEN

  The White House

  In the Afghan Mountains

  Bin Laden’s Camp

  ELIZABETH MCGARVEY

  FOURTEEN

  In the Afghan Mountains

  Chevy Chase

  FIFTEEN

  National Reconnaissance Office Langley

  CIA Headquarters

  Bin Laden’s Camp

  SIXTEEN

  The White House

  In the Afghan Mountains

  CIA Headquarters

  SEVENTEEN

  To Kabul

  In the Afghan Mountains

  Kabul

  EIGHTEEN

  Washington, D.C.

  Chevy Chase

  Georgetown

  Falls Church, Virginia

  Chevy Chase

  NINETEEN

  Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

  The White House

  CIA Headquarters

  Karachi, Pakistan

  TWENTY

  Chevy Chase

  Aboard Gulfstream VC111 En Route to the U.S.

  Andrews Air Force Base

  CIA Headquarters

  TWENTY-ONE

  M/V Margo

  CIA Headquarters

  TWENTY-TWO

  Arabian Sea

  Arlington, Virginia

  The White House

  Chevy Chase

  TWENTY-THREE

  Chevy Chase Country Club

  National Security Agency

  Chevy Chase

  CIA Headquarters

  Chevy Chase Country Club

  Cabin John, Maryland

  Chevy Chase

  DEBORAH HAYNES TWO MONTHS LATER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Khartoum, Sudan

  New York City

  Aboard Air Force One

  TWENTY-FIVE

  M/V Margo Off Cabo San Lazaro, Baja California

  CIA Headquarters

  San Francisco

  CIA Headquarters

  La Jolla

  CIA Headquarters

  TWENTY-SIX

  Los Angeles

  CIA Headquarters

  Rosario de Arriba, Mexico

  M/V Margo West of Isla San Martin

  CIA Headquarters

  New York City

  CIA Headquarters

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Aphrodite Southwest of Ensenada, Mexico

  M/V Margo

  Aphrodite

  M/V Margo

  U.S. Coast Guard Station San Diego, California

  M/V Margo

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Chevy Chase

  CIA Headquarters

  Los Angeles

  New York City

  M/V Margo Southwest of San Diego

  New York City

  Los Angeles

  San Francisco Candlestick Park

  San Francisco FEMA Operations Center

  Candlestick Park

  CIA Headquarters

  M/V Margo West of Los Angeles

  Golden Gate Bridge

  TWENTY-NINE

  M/V Margo Southwest of the Farallon Islands

  Candlestick Park

  FEMA Operations Center

  M/V Margo Golden Gate Holding Basin

  Candlestick Park

  M/V Margo

  Candlestick Park

  FEMA Operations Center

  Candlestick Park

  Golden Gate Bridge

  M/V Margo

  The MetLife Blimp

  The Pilot Boat

  Golden Gate Bridge

  M/V Margo

  Over the Golden Gate

  The MetLife Blimp

  FEMA Operations Center

  Coast Guard Cutter WMEC 907 Escanaba

  M/V Margo

  VS-31, McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II

  Golden Gate Bridge

  M/V Margo

  Golden Gate Bridge

  The Golden Gate

  Golden Gate Bridge

  The Golden Gate

  Golden Gate Bridge

  THE FINAL MOVES FIVE DAYS LATER

  THIRTY

  Khartoum, Sudan

  Bethesda Naval Hospital

  My Father’s Daughter

  FICTION BY DAVID HAGBERG

  Praise

  EDEN’S GATE

  PROLOGUE

  Copyright Page

  This book is for Lorrel.

  Special thanks to all my friends at I.R.N.B. You guys are awesome!

  THE OPENING MOVES SUMMER

  Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

  REVELATIONS 6:8

  ONE

  CIA Headquarters Langley, Virginia

  Aweary and worried Allen Trumble got off the elevator on the seventh floor where he had to submit to a third and final security check. There wasn’t a lot of activity in the corridors, but then there usually wasn’t except during shift changes. But from the moment he’d entered the front doors he was struck by the underlying tension here, which did nothing to dispel his gloomy mood. What he was bringing to the deputy director of Operations wasn’t going to help much; not the CIA and certainly not himself.

  The civilian security officer handed Trumble’s pass and ID back. “Just down the hall to the right, sir.”

  “Yes, thank you, I’ve been here before,” Trumble said. But not often and not lately. Most of his seventeen years on the payroll had been spent in foreign postings, most recently as chief of station Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But it was time to come home now, maybe. His life was beginning to unravel and he didn’t really know why or what to do about it, except that a change of scenery might help.

  He was an unremarkable looking man of medium height with thinning light brown hair, a slightly stoop-shouldered gait, and puffy features from living for too long in the dry desert climates of the Middle East. But he was an Arabic expert and that’s where the work was happening. In fact because he had lived for so long in-country he probably knew more about the region than all but the most senior analysts here. Certainly enough to know that very large trouble was brewing.

  But until now he’d also considered himself to be a very lucky man. He had a job that challenged him, a wife who loved him and two children who thought the sun rose and set on their father. All of it going down the toilet. In the past year Gloria had become distant, spending most of her free time watching reruns of American television sitcoms. It was as if she had forgotten what home was like and she was trying to remind herself. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Julie had experimented dying her hair first orange, then pink, but their Saudi neighbors had begun to complain and Trumble had to put his foot down.
Julie was still resentful, and she moped around the house speaking only when spoken to, and then in monosyllables. In their twelve-year-old son Daniel’s estimation it was time to go home. Most of the people they’d met over there were okay, but they didn’t really like Americans, and he was getting tired of it. He wanted a Mickey D’s, a real mall, Little League baseball and some new video games. Never mind that he had been born in Baghdad, and had never spent much time in the States. He missed it and he wanted to go home.

  The deputy director of Operation’s suite was at the end of the hall from the director’s office. Trumble hurried down the broad, carpeted corridor, and went inside not at all sure exactly what sort of a message he was bringing home with him. He was the Arab expert, but this time he was out of his depth and he knew it.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Trumble,” the DDO’s secretary, Dahlia Swanfeld said pleasantly.

  “Hello,” Trumble smiled, trying to hide his nervousness. “I have a two o’clock with the deputy director.” It was one minute before that time now.

  “He’s on the phone. Shouldn’t be long. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No thanks. We had a late lunch, McDonald’s.”

  Ms. Swanfeld smiled and nodded. Though she’d never married—the CIA was her life—she sometimes acted like a kindly grandmother. Trumble could feel genuine interest and good cheer radiating from her like warmth from a wood stove on a cold winter’s day. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good.

  “How is your family? Happy to be on vacation and back home?”

  “It’s going to be hard to drag them back to Riyadh. But I think we might be coming home again for Christmas. My folks are insisting on it, and it’s hard to say no to your mother, wife and kids. I’m sorta outnumbered.”

  “I’d like to meet them.” The light on her telephone console blinked out and she picked up the phone. “Mr. Trumble is here.” She looked up. “You may go in now.”

  Kirk McGarvey, his jacket off, his tie loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up, was pulling a thick, red-striped file folder from one of the piles on his large desk. Stacks of newspapers and news magazines from a dozen different countries were piled neatly on the floor around him, and a television monitor, the sound very low, was tuned to CNN. The computer monitor on a credenza next to him was on, but showed only the CIA’s seal.

  “Nice to see you back in one piece.” McGarvey got up, came around the desk and shook Trumble’s hand. “Gloria and the kids okay?”

  “They’re out shopping. We need vacation clothes, but God only knows what they’re going to buy for me. Whatever it is, though, I’m going to have to wear it and like it.”

  At fifty, Kirk McGarvey had worked for the CIA for twenty-five years and kept himself in superb condition by a strict physical regimen that included running and swimming everyday and working out at his fencing club whenever he could. He was a hard man, who until he’d taken over the job as DDO twelve months ago, had been the best field officer the CIA had ever known. The fact that he had been a shooter and had killed in the line of duty was widely known. What wasn’t so well known, however, was the number of people he had killed, or the tremendous physical and mental toll the job had taken on him and his family.

  He was six feet tall, two hundred pounds and built like a rugby player with not an ounce of visible fat on his broad-shouldered frame. But he was a Voltaire scholar and that curious combination—killer, academic and now administrator—seemed to fit him well. He exuded self-confidence, intelligence, honesty and above all dependability. He had never let one of his people down, he had never held anything back from them, unless in his estimation they didn’t have the need to know, and he was surrounded by a staff of very bright, very dedicated friends who excelled under his direction. There was a comfort zone around him. When you were with McGarvey you knew that everything would turn out okay. All hell might break loose, but you’d come out of it. He’d make sure of it.

  His face was wide, handsome and friendly, unless he was being lied to. His motto was: Don’t bullshit the troops; tell it like it is, or don’t tell it at all.

  “Do you want a beer?” McGarvey motioned toward the couch, chairs and low table by the window.

  “Sounds good.” Trumble set his attaché case on the coffee table, dialed the combination and took out his report contained in a thin file folder.

  McGarvey got a couple of beers from a small fridge in his credenza and brought them back. He took the report. “Not much here.”

  “You might want to take a quick read, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “Mac. But I’d rather hear it from you first. What are our chances?”

  “Osama bin Laden is not a good man,” Trumble said, opening his beer. His hand shook a little and McGarvey noticed it. “He might be crazy.”

  “What’d he say to you? What does he want?” McGarvey asked, giving his COS his entire attention.

  “Well, he says he wants to talk to someone in authority. Someone higher than a chief of station. It’s a good possibility that he means to assassinate whoever we send to him, providing he thinks that person is a worthy enough target.” Trumble had made the arrangements to meet with the Saudi multimillionaire terrorist in Khartoum, at McGarvey’s request. No U.S. intelligence officer had been able to get anywhere near him or his business interests in the Sudan, or his camps in the mountains of Afghanistan, but McGarvey had a hunch that he might be ready to talk. The bad part was that a lot of people here in Washington and in London believed that bin Laden was getting ready to make another spectacular strike again, but no one knew when, where or how. In 1998 more than five thousand people had been hurt and more than two hundred killed when a bomb exploded outside the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. There’d been many other attacks with loss of lives, but Nairobi had been the biggest to date. The general consensus was that there would be a next time and it would be even worse.

  “They took my tape recorder before they brought me up to see him, but it really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been able to keep it, because I wasn’t with him for more than two or three minutes. He told me that I was the face of evil and that if I were to die then and there, no one would shed a tear.”

  McGarvey sat back, a dark, calculating expression in his gray-green eyes. Bin Laden hadn’t balked at the meeting, in fact he’d agreed to it almost too readily, which meant he wanted something, unless he was stalling for time. It was a possibility they would have to consider. Bin Laden could be keeping them talking while he was getting ready to strike. With the latest information McGarvey had seen and the reason he’d sent Trumble orders to set up the meeting, this time when bin Laden struck it would be worse than Nairobi, much worse than anything they could imagine.

  “Did he give you any names, Allen? Anyone in specific who he wanted to talk to?”

  “No, just someone more important than me.” Trumble shuddered. “The bad part is that he knows more about me than I know about him. He told me to get out or die, but I thought I could push it just a little. Maybe he was bargaining, they do that a lot. So I promised that we’d lift the bounty on his head like you suggested.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  Trumble looked McGarvey in the eye. “His exact words. He said, ‘Your wife’s name is Gloria, isn’t it? Your children are Daniel and Julie?’”

  “Jesus,” McGarvey said sitting up suddenly. “Were you followed back to Riyadh?”

  “I don’t think so. Look, it was just his way of letting me know that his intelligence was at least as good as ours and that he wasn’t screwing around. Saving face is everything out there and we are the infidels. He’s taken to heart the idea of knowing his enemies. He could have killed me then and there, dumped my body somewhere it would never be found.” Trumble shook his head, as if he were trying to shrug off the incident, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “He doesn’t operate that way, on that small a scale, I mean. If he wants a bigger fish, killing me wouldn’t have done him any good.”

  McGarvey go
t up and went back to his desk. “Who’s your ACOS?”

  “Jeff Cook.”

  “Is he ready to run a station on his own?”

  Trumble was a little confused. “He’s coming along. I didn’t hesitate leaving him in charge. He can handle the routine, although his Arabic is a little weak. The Saudis get along with him okay.”

  McGarvey picked up his phone. “Dahlia, have Dick come right over and then get me Dave Whittaker.” Whittaker was the area divisions chief in charge of all foreign CIA stations and missions. McGarvey held his hand over the phone. “Is he married, any kids?”

  “No kids. He’s divorced, his wife’s back in Michigan, or someplace in the Midwest.”

  McGarvey turned back to the phone. “Dave, I have a housekeeping job for you, but I want it done on the QT. I’m pulling Allen Trumble and his family out of Riyadh, effective immediately. In fact he’s in my office right now, so I want you to send a security detail over there to shut down his apartment and get his things back here.”

  Trumble was floored, and he started to object, but McGarvey held him off.

  “I’m putting his ACOS Jeff Cook in charge for the time being. We’ll see how it works out.” McGarvey was watching Trumble. “But listen to me, Dave, tell security to watch their step. Allen’s apartment could be rigged.”

  Trumble’s stomach flopped. The thought that bin Laden could have ordered someone to booby-trap his apartment had never occurred to him.

  “Bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “That’s what Allen told me, but I don’t want to take any chances. This isn’t going to turn out to be another Buckley case.” In 1985 CIA Director William Casey sent his Beirut COS Bill Buckley back into the field after the U.S. embassy out there had been sacked and his cover blown. He’d been picked up the day he got back. He was tortured and eventually murdered.