Acts of war

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Tom Clancy's Op-Center 4: Acts of War

created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik ISBN No. 0-425-1560X ©1997

Note : Acknowledgments and About the Creators at the End of File.

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ONE

Monday, 11:00 a.m., Qamishli, Syria

Ibrahim al-Rashid raised his sunglasses. He peered through the dirty window of the 1963 Ford Galaxy.

The young Syrian kept his eyes open, and enjoyed the jolt of sunlight as it bounced off the golden desert. He enjoyed the pain just as he enjoyed the heat on his face, the hot air in his lungs, the warm perspiration on his back. He enjoyed the discomfort as the Prophets must have enjoyed it, the men who came to the desert to be hammered on the anvil of God, made ready for His great purpose.

Anyway, he thought, enjoy it or not, most of Syria is a furnace in the summer. The car's struggling fan did little to relieve the heat, and the presence of three other men raised it even higher.

Ibrahim's elder brother Mahmoud was beside him in the driver's seat. Though Mahmoud was sweating heavily, he was uncharacteristically calm, even when the newer, faster Peugeots and Fiats passed them on the divided highway. Mahmoud didn't want to get into a fight, not now. But when it was time to fight, there was no one bolder. Even when they were children, Mahmoud had always been ready to take on larger boys in greater numbers. Behind them, in the back seat, Yousef and Ali played cards for a piastre a hand. Each loss was accompanied by a mild oath. Neither man suffered defeat graciously, which was why they were here.

The restored eight cylinder engine moved them smoothly along the modern Route 7. The Galaxy was ten years older than Ibrahim and had been rebuilt many times, most recently by himself. But the trunk was spacious enough to hold what they needed, the chassis was solid, and the car was strong. Like this nation of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Circassians, and many others, the Galaxy had been cobbled together from many parts, some old and some new. But still it moved forward.

Ibrahim looked out at the blanched landscape. It wasn't like the desert in the south, all sand and dust clouds, shimmering mirages and graceful twisters, the black tents of Bedouins and occasional oases. It was an endless stretch of dried and broken dirt, of barren hills and hundreds of tells---mounds of ruins that marked the cites of ancient settlements. There were a few modern additions to the landscape, such as abandoned vehicles and petrol stations as well as sheds where people sold stale food and hot drink. The Syrian desert had always been a lure for adventurers and poets, caravans and archaeologists who embraced and then romanticized its dangers. But this region located between the great Tigris and Euphrates had once been alive. Not like it was now. Not like it was before the Turks began to strangle the water supply.

Ibrahim thought back to this morning, to words his father had said to them all before they set out.

"Water is life. Control one and you control the other."

Ibrahim knew the history and geography of the region and its water. He had put in two tours of duty in the Air Force. Since his discharge, he'd listened to the old hands talk about drought and famine as he repaired tractors and other machinery on a large farm.

Formerly known as Mesopotamia, Greek for "the land between the rivers," the Syrian land was now called al-Gezira, "the island.'' An island without water.

The Tigris River was once one of the most important transportation routes in the world. It originates in eastern Turkey and flows nearly 1,150 miles southeast through Iraq, where it meets the Euphrates at Basra. The equally mighty Euphrates is formed by the confluence of the Kara and Murad Rivers in Eastern Turkey. It flows mostly southward and then southeast for almost 1,700 miles, surging through great canyons and jagged gorges along its upper course, and a vast flood plain in Syria and Iraq. Where they meet, the Tigris and the Euphrates form the river channel Shatt al Arab, which flows southeast into the Persian Gulf and is part of the border between Iraq and Iran. The two countries have long fought over navigation rights to the 120 mile waterway.

The Tigris and Euphrates in the east and the great Nile River in the west once defined the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of a number of early civilizations stretching back as far as 5000 B.C.

The Cradle of Civilization, Ibrahim thought. His homeland. One third of his great nation, now lifeless and rotting.

Over the centuries, warships came down the Euphrates and tribes were forced to move west. The waterwheels and irrigation canals in the east were neglected as the western part of the country grew---the line of great cities stretching from Aleppo in the north down through Hama, Homs, and eternal Damascus. The Euphrates was abandoned, and then it was murdered. Its once-bright waters were turned brown with industrial and human waste, most of it from Turkey, and not even the melting mountain snows or heavy rains could cleanse it. In the 1980s, Turkey began a massive reclamation project by constructing a series of dams along the upper course of the Euphrates. This effort helped to clean the river and keep Turkey fertile. But it caused the north of Syria and especially al-Gezira to fall further into drought and starvation.

And Syria did nothing to prevent it, Ibrahim thought bitterly. There was Israel to fight in the southwest and Iraq to watch in the southeast. The Syrian government did not want its entire northern border, over four hundred miles, jeopardized by tension with the Turks.

More recently, however, there had been other voices. They had grown increasingly loud in 1996, after repeated, vicious attacks against the Kurds. Thousands of Kurds died in clashes with the Turks in the Hakkari Province near the border with Iraq. Thousands more died when Sadam Hussein used poison gas on Kurds at Halabja. The bloodshed was made worse by infighting among the various Kurdish sects---battles over land, over tradition, over the degree of interaction that would be tolerated with non-Kurds.

Finally, a truce was called by the ailing Mullah Mustafa Mirza, leader of the small but powerful Mirza clan in Iraq. He asked for unity. And the charismatic Walid al-Nasri, leader of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, agreed to help provide it.

Over the past few months, Ibrahim had spent all of his free time in Haseke, a quiet city to the southwest, working with the local patriots in the PKK of which his brother was an officer. As he made sure printing presses and cars were working as they were supposed to, Ibrahim had listened eagerly to Mahmoud's views about establishing a homeland. As he helped carry guns and bomb-making material under the cover of night, Ibrahim had listened to their bitter debates about unification with other Kurdish factions. As he relaxed after helping to train small groups of fighting men, he'd listened as arrangements were made to meet with Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, to plan for a homeland, to select a leader.

Ibrahim put his sunglasses back on. The world became dark again.

Today, the only reason most people cross al-Gezira is to travel to Turkey. That was true for Ibrahim, though he wasn't most people. Most people came with cameras to photograph the bazaars or the World War I trenches or the mosques. They came with maps and picks for archaeological digs, or with American jeans or Japanese electronics to sell on the black market.

Ibrahim and his team came with something else. A purpose. To return the waters to al-Gezira.

TWO

Monday, 1:22 p.m., Sanliurfa, Turkey

Attorney Lowell Coffey II stood on the shaded side of a nondescript, six-wheel white trailer and touched the hem of his red neckerchief. He dabbed away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes. He silently cursed the hum of the battery-powered engine that told him the air-conditioning was running inside the van. Then he stared across barren terrain, which was dotted with dry hills. Three hundred yards away was a deserted asphalt road that rippled beneath the afternoon heat. Beyond that, separated by three barren miles and more than five thousand years, was the city of Sanliurfa.

Thirty-three-year-old biophysicist Dr. Phil Katzen stood to the attorney's right. The long-haired scientist shielded his eyes as he looked toward the dusty outline of the ancient metropolis.

"Did you know, Lowell," Katzen said, "that ten thousand years ago, right where we're standing, is where beasts of burden were first domesticated? They were aurochs---wild ox. They tilled the soil right under our feet."

"That's great," Coffey said. "And you can probably tell me what the soil composition was then too. Right?"

"No." Katzen smiled. "Only now. All of the nations in this region have to keep records like that to see how long the fanmlands'll hold out. I've got the soil file on diskette. As soon as Mike and Mary Rose are finished, I'll load it up if you want to read it."

"No, thanks," Coffey said. "I have enough trouble retaining all the goddamn information I'm supposed to learn. I'm getting old, y'know."

"You're thirty-nine," Katzen said.

"Not much longer," Coffey said. "I was born forty years ago tomorrow."

Katzen grinned. "Well, happy birthday, counselor."

"Thanks," Coffey said, "but it won't be. Like I said, I'm getting old, Phil."

"Don't knock it," Katzen said. He pointed toward Sanliurfa. "When that place was young, forty was old. Back then most people lived to be about twenty. And not a healthy twenty at that. They were plagued by rotten teeth, broken bones, bad eyesight, athlete's foot, you-name-it. Hell, today the voting age in Turkey is twenty-one. Do you realize that ancient leaders in places like Uludere, Sirnak, and Batman couldn't even have voted for themselves?"

Coffey looked at him. "There's a place called Batman?"

"Right on the Tigris," Katzen said. "See? There's always something new to learn. I spent a couple hours this morning learning about the ROC. Helluva machine Matt and Mary Rose designed. Knowledge keeps you young, Lowell."

"Learning about Batman and the ROC aren't exactly things to live for," Coffey said. "And as far as your ancient Turks are concerned, with all the planting and sowing and irrigating and rock-hauling those people did, forty years old probably felt like eighty."

"True enough."

"And their life's work was probably the same job they'd been doing since they were ten," Coffey said. "Nowadays we're supposed to live longer and evolve, professionally."

"You trying to say you haven't?" Katzen asked.

"I've evolved like the dodo," Coffey said. "Stasis and then extinction. By this time in my life I always thought I'd be an international heavy hitter, working for the President and negotiating trade and peace accords."

"Ease up, Lowell.." Katzen said. "You're in the arena."

"Yeah," Coffey replied. "The nosebleed seats. I'm working for a low-profile government agency nobody's ever heard of---"

"Low-profile doesn't mean lack of distinction," Katzen pointed out.

"It does in my end of the arena," Coffey replied. "I work in a basement at Andrews Air Force Base---not even Washington, D.C., for God's sake---brokering necessary but unexciting deals with grudgingly hospitable nations like Turkey so that we can all spy on even less hospitable nations like Syria. On top of that, I'm roasting in the freakin' desert, sweat running down my legs into my goddamn socks, instead of arguing First Amendment cases in front of the Supreme Court."

"You're also starting to whine," Katzen said.

"Guilty," Coffey said. "Birthday boy's prerogative."

Katzen pushed up the back of Coffey's felted wool Australian Outback hat so it covered his eyes. "Lighten up. Not every useful job has to be a sexy one."

"It isn't that," Coffey replied. "Well, maybe just a little it is." He removed the Outback hat, used his index finger to wipe sweat from around the band, then settled the hat back on his dirty blond hair. "I guess what I'm really saying is that I was a law prodigy, Phil. The Mozart of jurisprudence. I was reading my dad's statute law books when I was twelve. When all my friends wanted to be astronauts or baseball players, I was thinking it'd be cool to be a bail bondsman. I could've done most of this stuff when I was fourteen or fifteen."

"Your suits would've been way too large," Katzen deadpanned.

Coffey frowned. "You know what I'm saying."

"You're saying you haven't lived up to your potential," Katzen said. "Well, ditto, ditto, and welcome to the real world."

"Being one disappointment among many doesn't make it sit any better, Phil," Coffey replied.

Katzen shook his head. "All I can say is, I wish I'd had you at my side when I was with Greenpeace."

"Sorry," Coffey said. "I don't hurl my body off ship decks to protect baby harp seals or stop six-foot-six hunters from setting out raw meat to draw out black bears.

"I did both of those once," Katzen said. "I got my nose broke doing one and scared the hell out of the harp seal doing the other. The point is, I had these pro bono slackers who didn't know a porpoise from a dolphin. What's worse was they didn't give a shit. I was in your office when you negotiated our little visit with the Turkish ambassador. You gave it everything and you created a handsome piece of work."

"I was dealing with a country that's got forty billion dollars of external debt, most of it to our country," Coffey said. "Getting them to see our point of view doesn't exactly put me in the genius class."

"Bull," Katzen said. "The Islamic Development Bank holds a lot of Turkish chits as well, and they expert a lot of pro-fundamentalist pressure on these people."

"Islamic law can't be imposed on the Turks," Coffey replied, "not even by a fiercely fundamentalist leader like the one they've got now. It says so in their Constitution."

"Constitutions can be amended," Katzen said. "Look at Iran."

"The secular population in Turkey is much higher," Coffey said. "If the Fundamentalists ever tried to take over here, there'd be civil war."

"Who can say there won't be?" Katzen asked. "Anyway, none of that is the point. You sprinted through NATO regulations, Turkish law, and U.S. policy to get us in here. No one else I know could've done that."

"So I had to cajole a little," Coffey said. "Even so, the Turkish deal was probably the high point of my year. When we return to Washington it'll be business as usual. I'll go to see Senator Fox with Paul Hood and Martha Mackall. I'll nod when Paul assures the senator that everything we did in Turkey was legal, that the soil studies you did in the east will be shared with Ankara and were the 'real' reason we were here, and I'll guarantee that if the Regional Op-Center program receives further funding we will continue to operate legally. Then I'll go back to my office and figure out how to use the ROC in ways not covered by international law." Coffey shook his head. "I know that's how things have to be done, but it's not dignified."

"At least we try to be," Katzen pointed out.

"You try to be," Coffey said. "You spend your career looking into nuclear accidents and oil fires and pollution. You make a difference, or at least you challenge yourself. I went into law to wrestle with real global issues, not to find legal loopholes for spies in Third World sweatboxes."

Katzen sighed. "You're schvitzing."

"What?"

"You're sweating. You're cranky. You're a day shy of forty. And you're being way too hard on yourself."

"No, too lenient." Coffey walked toward the cooler nestled in the shade of one of the three nearby tents. He saw the unopened paperback copy of Lord Jim, which he'd brought along to read. It had seemed an appropriate selection when he was standing in the air-conditioned Washington, D.C., bookstore. Now he wished he'd picked up Dr. Zhivago or Call of the Wild. "I think I'm having an epiphany," Coffey said, "like all those patriarchs who used to go into the desert."

"This isn't desert," Katzen said. "It's what we call nonarable pastureland."

"Thanks," Coffey said. "I'll file that next to Batman, Turkey, as something to remember."

"Jeez," Katzen said, "you really are cranky. I don't think being forty is what's doing this. I think the heat's dried up your brains."

"Could be," Coffey said. "Maybe that's why everyone's always been at war in this part of the world. You ever hear about the Eskimos fighting over ice floes or penguin eggs?"

"I've visited the Inuit on the Bering Coast," Katzen said. "They don't fight with each other because they have a different outlook on life. Religion is comprised of two elements: faith and culture. The Inuit have faith without fanaticism, and to them it's a very private matter. The culture is the public part. They share wisdom, tradition, and fables instead of insisting that their way is the only way. The same is true of many tropical and sub-tropical peoples in Africa, South America, and the Far East. It has nothing to do with the climate."

"I don't believe that about the climate," Coffey said. "At least, not entirely." He removed a can of Tab from the melting ice in the cooler and popped it. As he poured the soda into his mouth, he squinted back at the long, gleaming van. For a moment, the despair left him. That seemingly nondescript vehicle was beautiful and sexy. He was proud to be associated with it, at least. The attorney stopped drinking and caught his breath. "I mean," he said, panting after the long, unbroken swallow, "look at cities or prisons where there are riots. Or compounds like Jonestown and Waco where people turn into cult-kooks. It never happens during a cold spell or a blizzard. It's always when it's hot. Look at the Biblical scholars who went out into the desert. Went out men, stayed in the heat, came back prophets. Heat lights our fuses."

"You don't think that God could have had anything to do with Moses and Jesus?" Katzen asked solemnly.

Coffey raised the canto his lips. "Touché," he said before he drank again.

Katzen turned to the young black woman standing to his right. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a sweat-stained khaki blouse, and a white headband. The uniform was "sterile." Nowhere did she display the winged-lightning shield of the rapid-deployment Striker force to which she belonged. Nor was there any other sign of military affiliation. Like the van itself, whose side-mounted mirror looked just like a mirror and not a parabolic dish, whose walls were intentionally dented and artificially rusted and didn't show a hint of the reinforced steel underneath, the woman looked like she was a seasoned archaeological field worker.

"What do you think, Sondra?" Katzen asked.

"With all due respect," said the young black woman, "I think you're both wrong. I think peace and war and sanity are all questions of leadership. Look at that old city out there." She spoke with quiet reverence. "Thirty centuries ago the prophet Abraham was born---right there. That was where he lived when God told him to move his family to Canaan. That man was touched by the Holy Spirit. He founded a people, a nation, a morality. I'm sure he was as warm as we are, especially when God told him to put a dagger into the bosom of his son. I'm sure his sweat as well as his tears fell onto the frightened face of Isaac." She looked from Katzen to Coffey. "His leadership was based on faith and love, and he is revered by Jews and Muslims alike."

"Nicely put, Private DeVonne," Katzen said.

"Very nicely put," Coffey agreed, "but it doesn't contradict my point. We're not all made of the same obedient, determined stuff as Abraham. And for some of us, the heat makes our natural irritability worse." He took another long drink from his sweating can of Tab. "There's another thing too. After twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes of camping here, I hate the living hell out of this place. I like air conditioning and cold water from a glass instead of hot water from a plastic bottle. And bathrooms. Those are good too."

Katzen smiled. "Maybe you'll appreciate them a whole lot more when you get back."

"I appreciated them before I left. Frankly, I still don't understand why we couldn't have tested this prototype in the U.S. We have enemies at home. I could have gotten clearance from any number of judges to spy on suspected terrorists, paramilitary camps, Mafiosi, you-name-it."

"You know the answer as well as I do," Katzen said.

"Sure," Coffey said. He drained the can of soda, dropped it in the plastic trash bag, and walked back to the van. "If we don't help the moderate True Path Party, the Islamic fundamentalists and their Welfare Party will continue to make gains here. And then you've got the Social Democratic Populist Party, the Democratic Left Party, the Democratic Center Party, the Reform Democratic Party, the Prosperity Party, the Refah Party, the Socialist Unity Party, the Correct Way Party, and the Great Anatolia Party, all of which have to be dealt with and all of whom want their piece of the very small Turkish pie. Not to mention the Kurds, who want freedom from the Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians." Coffey used his index fingers to wipe sweat from his eyes. "If the Welfare Party does happen to take control of Turkey and its military, Greece will be threatened. Disputes in the Aegean Sea will come to a head and NATO will be torn apart. Europe and the Middle East will be endangered and everyone will turn to the U.S. for help. We'll gladly provide it, of course, but only in the form of shuttle diplomacy. We can't afford to take sides in a war like that."

"Excellent summation, counselor."

"Except for one thing," Coffey continued. "For my money, they can all take a flying leap. This isn't like when you took a leave of absence to save the spotted owl from loggers."

"Stop," Katzen said. "You're embarrassing me. I'm not all that virtuous."

"I'm not talking about virtue," Coffey said. "I'm talking about being committed to something worthwhile. You went to Oregon, did your on-site protest, testified at the state legislature, and got the problem solved. This situation is fifty centuries years old. Ethnic factions have always fought one another here and they always will. We can't stop them, and it's a waste of valuable resources even trying."

"I disagree," Katzen replied. "We can mitigate the situation. And who knows? Maybe the next five thousand years will be better."

"Or maybe the U.S. will get sucked into a religious war that'll tear us apart," Coffey replied. "I'm an isolationist at heart, Phil. That's one thing Senator Fox and I have in common. We've got the best country in the history of the world, and those who don't want to join us in the democratic melting pot can shoot, bomb, gas, nuke, and martyr each other until they're all in Paradise. I really don't care."