Gary Haynes - State Of Attack

Interesting, the general thought. He eased himself back in the chair and crossed his legs. “Idle speculation, to be sure. But just between us, and to pass the time, if you will, who is this Maroof, the baba?”

“They say he is a degenerate who is addicted to heroin and Russian prostitutes, but powerful, nonetheless. Who knows?”

The general knew the Turkish mafia dominated the global smack trade. They processed the raw opiates from the Middle East in underground labs and trafficked the drug to the US and Western Europe. He knew too that the local mafia were more deadly than the Albanians and equalled the Mexican cartels in terms of savagery, favouring prolonged torture. The babas, or godfathers, were shadowy figures, who employed death squads such as the Grey Wolves. It was well-documented by the CIA that the so-called Turkish “Deep State”, an arrangement between the babas, politicians, intelligence services and high-ranking military officers, was impenetrable. The mafia ran protection rackets and in turn paid protection to those who could otherwise destroy them.

“Anything else?” the general said.

“That’s it.”

“You sure?”

Habib picked up the phone from its cradle and gestured towards the general with it. “Shall I call for your car now, general?”

The general decided not to push it. He had a lead and that was more than he’d expected before he’d entered the office. The game had come to an end. He stooped to the side and took a notepad and pen from his briefcase. He found that it elicited a more honest response than a recording device. It was a simple psychological tool whereby the interviewee perceived a lesser sense of replication, perhaps because it lacked the evidential value of a verbatim recording.

“Now, this damn conflict – what’s the army’s position?” the general asked, knowing that Turkey’s army was the second biggest in NATO.

His question was a genuine one. Part of his remit was to find out if there was any chance that the army would take a hard-line stance. Maybe even enact a coup, a temporary military government to ensure full-blown anarchy didn’t break out on the streets.

The “Deep State”, the state within the Turkish state, the general knew, had been born of the military’s paranoia since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was constantly on the brink of some sort of collapse, they believed. It was ultra-nationalistic and, by its very nature, undemocratic and corrupt. But Turkey was a trusted ally, at least for now, and with the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, the general had been briefed that the White House and the State Department were more than keen to keep it that way.

As Habib spouted the official party line of the increasingly Islamic party that held power, the general couldn’t stop his mind from wandering to Ibrahim. The man was becoming a menace, stirring up Sunni Muslim agitation and recruiting jihadists from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Initially, he’d come up on the Mossad’s radar, the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.

Things were sketchy, but the Mossad would get short shrift from the Sunni Turks, so this had been down to him. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, his employer, a relatively new federal agency under the control of the Defense Department that was part of the overarching foreign military espionage organization, wanted the guy found: dead or alive. Osama bin Laden style, although that was only known to a handful of people in the US.

“So, general, I’m sure you have other pressing business. But let me give you some friendly advice. Despite the heat, negotiating the political landscape in Turkey is like walking across a frozen lake, so you would do well to tread light from now on.” Habib smiled his closed-mouthed smile.

The general nodded. Habib was right, despite what appeared to be his change in attitude. Perhaps the bribe has mellowed him, the general thought. The Turk was richer by ten thousand US dollars, after all.

He reached down to his briefcase, replaced the pen and pad, got up and left without saying a word, feeling a little shabbier than when he’d first arrived, despite the intel. But then again, he always did after doing deals like this. When he’d worn a uniform life had seemed so much simpler, so much more black and white.

Chapter 10

After a full ten seconds, Habib opened a desk drawer with his free hand and took out a silver Zippo. He lit up and took a long pull on the cigarette before taking a disposable cellphone from his inside jacket pocket.

He’d get paid by the Americans. He liked that, even though he had put his pension, if not his life, in jeopardy. But he consoled himself by thinking that if the worst happened, he and his young family could run, and there were a lot worse places than the US to run to. They would put him into some sort of witness protection programme. It would be fine.

He laughed out loud like a crazy man. Habib, the double agent. Yes, he liked that. And the best part was that he would get paid whether the general died or not, given what he knew was about to transpire.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the seemingly boundless cityscape, at the blocks of glass and steel and the powder-blue tiles of the ancient minarets. These were the two stories of Turkey, he thought, at once a modern free market economy and a Muslim state that still believed dogma was relevant. As a result, he foresaw a great calamity about to afflict his country, the strains of which were already apparent. The dichotomy between women who wore make-up and Gucci shades, and those who wanted to beat them for not wearing the hijab.

But most of all he feared the Sunni-Shia conflict and all of its violent offshoots. He didn’t want his wife and two girls to be around when the streets were filled with sectarian gangs and armed militias. He had joined MIT to protect them, but, the dangers of his duplicity aside, no one could protect them from what was coming, he believed. He glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision and looked down at the windowsill. A moth was there, with speckled brown wings. It was crawling around as if it was drunk. He looked closer and saw that it was dragging one of its back legs behind it, which had been clearly rendered useless. He put his outstretched fingers close to it, as if he was coaxing it to climb up. But the insect just scuttled around even more slowly in a decreasing circle.

He thought about opening the window to let it fly out but quickly realized it was dying, probably of old age or sheer fatigue. And as he looked at it dragging its leg behind it in that self-defeating circle, he saw the general in his mind’s eye.

He’s just left, he texted with his thumb.

Chapter 11

Ibrahim was sitting at a dark wooden table with a pristine white tablecloth, the sides flanked by empty terracotta pots. The open-fronted café, protected from the sun by a red-wine-coloured canopy, overlooked a square, a paved pedestrian area dotted with stubby palm trees set in whitewashed stones. He was wearing a cinnamon-coloured suit and a brown collarless shirt. His long dishevelled hair had been styled professionally and rested low on the nape, his beard reduced to a goatee, the sign of an intellectual in Turkey.

A few yards away, a young man was selling ice cream from a shaded, hand-drawn cart, and children were lining up excitedly. It was 12:36 in Ankara, seven hours ahead of DC. Despite the heat, those locals who weren’t labouring in the open for a living appeared carefree and relaxed.

People forget easily, Ibrahim thought, or perhaps chose to believe nothing changes. The debris from a demonstration that had taken place the night before, and which he’d witnessed from the small balcony of his hotel room, had been all but cleared away. Riot police had used water cannon and stun grenades to disperse the anti-government demonstrators. If it had started up again this morning, the truck bombing, days in the planning, would have been thwarted.