Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“You got something?”

“There was an undamaged sector header on the otherwise quite useless hard drive. The process is called file carving. Our people were able to extract bits of information from the header, including IP addresses recorded on the data sector. The data sector was gone, the data, therefore, was gone, but not the Internet Protocol addresses. They came from a server in Manila, in the Philippines. We’ve just penetrated it remotely, located the origin of the IPs, and learned that many were created in Dearborn, Michigan.”

A silence settled into the room.

Finally, it was the Director who spoke.

“That is why, Sergeant Swagger, in one hour you and Mr. Gold are taking off for Washington. Your FBI shares our concern. The evidence is irrefutable. Juba the Sniper is headed to America. He is going to shoot a high-value target from a long way away. And probably quite soon.”

Working group MARJORIE DAW

Dearborn’s a bitch,” said the special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, Ronald Houston. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody talks to everybody. Everybody listens to everybody. The radicals are buried in the general population but operate with the general population’s tacit support — and, in emergencies, active support. And Arabs — not to stereotype — being volatile, bristly, highly verbal, crafted by a millennium in the marketplace, haggling about everything, haggling for the sheer love of haggling, get lawyered up, are smart about politics, understand leverage and patronage and election support, so the local judiciary has been penetrated and subverted. It’s really hard to get a subpoena for a wiretap, and if you do get it, the folks who are the subject will hear of it before you. To get a warrant is even harder, and to serve it by force — that is, to raid — is almost a legal impossibility. No midnight door-busting in Dearborn. So you can’t tap, you can’t raid. I suppose you could surveil, but the community is wired so tight that any vans or teams in apartments or street-level retail are blown before they’re even inserted. On top of that, if you do make some kind of initiative, it better be executed perfectly, because, if not, you will be sued, your litigants will be all over the tube, claiming harassment and bias and anti-Islamic prejudice, the academics at Ann Arbor will join the hallelujah chorus, the protestors, with their genocide signs, will be out in the hundreds, and suddenly you’re teaching at a junior college in Tennessee for the rest of your life. That leaves snitches. Please note, I do not say ‘our’ snitches, because although we have a lot of them, we’re never quite sure who they’re working for. They are expert at playing both ends against the middle, can switch allegiances in midsentence and switch back again before the punctuation at the end. Can they be trusted? Yes, no, and maybe. Penetration? Forget it. You’ll never get a double into the cells. They know each other too well, and have for a thousand years. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Egyptian, or whatever, them-against-us will always trump them-against-them. Shiite or Sunni — whatever — makes no difference. That’s the realpolitik of the situation, gentlemen. You’re up against a system that is thirteen hundred years old and has stood against opponents for twelve hundred of those years. They know the ropes. They invented the ropes.”

“Thanks, Ron,” said Nick Memphis. “At least we know where we are. Mr. Gold, with your experience in that part of the world — I can’t help thinking the situation sounds a lot like Tel Aviv’s problems in Gaza City — I wonder if you have any suggestions or observations.”

The briefing was not being held in the FBI Detroit Field Office. It probably hadn’t been penetrated, but both Gold and the SAIC, the special agent in charge, agreed that you couldn’t be too sure. So it took place in an Ann Arbor library conference room, forty miles northwest of Dearborn. The SAIC came in one car — his own — after hours, his assistant in another. The entire MARJORIE DAW working group, a co-FBI/Mossad task force consisting of Nick Memphis, Gershon Gold, and consultant Bob Lee Swagger, who shared the room with the federals, assembled itself.

It had been a crazy couple of days, way too full of meetings for anyone’s pleasure, but you couldn’t put stuff together like this without suits sitting around tables in fluorescent-lit rooms, making decisions. The most important had already been made, however, and that was to grade MARJORIE DAW priority one, and Nick, dragged out of retirement because he knew and was trusted by Swagger, reported directly to Ward Taylor, the Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, with copies to the Director himself. What was the budget? Priority one essentially meant there was no budget. At the same time, it was to be separated and shielded from Taylor’s same Counterterrorism Division, at least for the immediate time being, on the idea that the fewer people that knew about it, the more likely it was to stay secure. It’s not that Counterterrorism had been penetrated; it’s that it was big, too big to control and monitor, and things always squiggled out of it, and if anyone was watching, those squiggles could be assembled into information.

“It sounds a lot like Gaza City,” said Gold in response to Nick’s question. “I agree on penetration agents. No luck with that in Gaza City either, and too many have died trying. I could suggest observation by drone, with a small team examining the photographic evidence, but, again, drones are cumbersome to administer in any number without ample notice being given, and surely word would quickly reach the ears of exactly those whom we wish it not to. Thus, I’m afraid we’re left with our eyeballs, and again I concur with Special Agent Houston. The more eyeballs, the better. But also, the more eyeballs, the worse. More eyeballs means more chances of a leak. So I would restrict our observer corps to those in this room. I would obtain a variety of utility vehicles — mail trucks, UPS vans, television repair vans, telephone company units — and I would invest the hours it takes to move about the city in irregular intervals, from target to target, looking for anomalies.”

“How would you prioritize the targets?” asked Nick.

“Surely Special Agent Houston has an idea of which mosques are home to radicalized imams and which are not. I would take that list and invert it. I think it far more likely, given the expense and effort they — whoever ‘they’ are — have taken with this operation, that they would prevail on a mosque known for its docility to harbor Juba.”

“Are we so sure he’s going to be in a mosque?” asked Swagger. “Thinking like a sniper, I’d go for the best hide, but certainly not one that’s already on a list.”

“Very good point, which gets at a congenital operational weakness among the brotherhood. As leaders of a theocracy, the mullahs and imams will always want control. We have found that although operational assembly points might not actually be within the mosque itself, they will always be near it. The leaders want close-by fellows as their assault troops, men they know from families they know. We have found, furthermore, that they tend to administer all ops from within the mosque — meaning that if food or other kinds of support are necessary, it will come from the mosque. Though, I might add, there aren’t so many pizza delivery shops in Gaza City as in Dearborn.”

“If we had time, we could open a pizza shop,” said Nick. “That’d get us into places we might not otherwise get into. But we don’t have time.”