12

 

Somewhere on the border between Iran and Pakistan

It was an ordinary Boeing C-135 transport plane. But the American air force leadership was justifiably proud of it and its role. The RC-135 Rivet Joint plane had been extensively modified and outfitted with an amazing array of onboard sensors that could detect, track, and ultimately locate targets geographically throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.

The air force believed it could track anything—even people— if given enough information to feed into its onboard sensor network. It had been used extensively for all kinds of missions for the better part of twenty years, from Desert Storm to the effort to oust the dictator of Libya.

The two pilots of this particular RC-135 Rivet Joint were especially keen about their target right now. It was well after midnight, but Saudi human intelligence on the ground in Pakistan had provided some extraordinary information.

The claim was that the operational deputy of al Qaeda, Ali bin Rahman, had chosen to move from a safe house in the mountains of northeastern Pakistan, near the China border, and was traveling on a highway that ran south and west along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The hard intelligence placed bin Rahman—who had once been a Saudi citizen—in a small, nondescript vehicle moving past Quetta in Pakistan. Incredibly, it seemed as if bin Rahman was headed toward the border of Iran and a town called Zahedan just inside eastern Iran.

Why bin Rahman would move into the open like this wasn’t clear. But the two pilots aboard the Joint Rivet didn’t care. Their job was to find and then track bin Rahman if he was, in fact, somewhere along the highway between Quetta in Pakistan and Zahedan in Iran.

The al Qaeda deputy was well known to Western intelligence officials, even if he wasn’t to the public in America and elsewhere. He’d essentially run the fractured, disparate al Qaeda network for years. The House of Saud was especially focused on bin Rahman’s intentions and his whereabouts.

The speculation at Langley was coalescing quickly around the belief that bin Rahman had set up the cell and the attack on the Airbus plane carrying the Saudi prince near Dulles airport. No one, as yet, had emerged to take credit for the attack. But the attack fit bin Rahman’s style of operations, the CIA and NSA leadership believed. And if it walks like a duck, it’s most likely a duck.

Ali bin Rahman was as anti-American as any leader in the loose al Qaeda network, but he was even more determined to remain a thorn in the side of the Saudi royal family. There were many guesses as to why, but the most logical reason seemed to be that he’d been denied a family inheritance in a family dispute and had then blamed politics inside the House of Saud for it.

One thing, though, was clear. Ali bin Rahman believed as passionately as anyone that the House of Saud stood firmly in the way of the true restoration of Sharia law across the Arab world and that it was centrally to blame for Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs.

It was for this reason that Saudi intelligence had made special efforts to locate the al Qaeda deputy. They believed that removing bin Rahman would solve many problems for them.

“We have all the signature data we need?” the first pilot asked.

“Fed into the onboard computer by the tech crew right before we took off,” said his copilot.

“Car and mobile device guesses?”

“Most likely.”

“And if we get a hit?”

“I brought a bottle of single malt to celebrate.” The copilot grinned.

There was a loud plink from the console. Both of them glanced instinctively at the place where the sound had come from.

“Well, I’ll be,” the first pilot murmured.

“We’ve got something, that’s for sure.”

They both quickly switched frequencies so they could listen to the chatter from the tech crew spread throughout the back of the plane. Genuine excitement rippled through the plane’s crew. They’d gotten not one, but two, hits. The first was on the car, which had been confirmed almost instantly through an electromagnetic detection pattern. And they’d gotten a second hit on a mobile device almost at the same time. The car’s occupant was talking to someone.

After several long minutes, the crew had confirmed that it was bin Rahman’s car and his mobile device. He was talking to someone on the ground waiting to meet with them at Zahedan, inside Iran.

“Who is it?” the first pilot asked after listening to the crew discuss what they were eavesdropping on from their vantage point.

“Sounds like someone named Bader at the other end, they’re saying.”

“Bader? A German name? In Iran?”

They both listened for several seconds. “No, it’s Bahadur.”

The first pilot’s jaw dropped reflexively. “Hussein Bahadur? The head of Iran’s air force? That’s who bin Rahman is meeting in Zahedan?”

“Sure sounds like it,” said the second pilot.

The first pilot whistled softly. “That isn’t going to sit well with the Saudis.”

“Nope,” said the copilot. “They’ll call for action as soon as we send this out. So should we? Do we have confirmation?”

They did, in fact, have all the confirmation they needed for Global Hawk, the unmanned aerial vehicle made by Northrup Grumman, which was also airborne right now.

“Tell the crew to transmit,” the first pilot said.

The orders went back, and the data was transmitted an instant later to the modern successor to the U-2 spy plane. The Global Hawk dutifully plotted the coordinates from the data. It had a rough calculation within seconds and then a very firm coordinate match shortly thereafter.

The Global Hawk sent the coordinates forward a moment later to analysts at a ground station. Once transmitted, the two pilots knew it was out of their hands. The information would soon be passed on to a command center for targeting.

From there, the command center would send the coordinates and likely route of the target to an E-3 Sentry AWACS command-andcontrol plane—essentially a flying battleship capable of directing warplanes in the area to the target.

From there, a fighter with advanced sensors could hunt the target without any further information needed, either from the air or the ground.

The decision to “acquire” the target was well above their pay grade. Neither pilot was quite sure whose call it was. Perhaps this one would go all the way to the president. But they’d done their job.