Pirate - Duncan Falconer [9]
Whatever was the case, the rumour was treated as highly plausible. Pretty much every Western government intelligence organisation began a search for the buyers and, most importantly, the weapons. The spiral-like patterns of the intelligence gathering system took a series of acute turns when someone working in the depths of the MI6 building on the Thames in London postulated that the shootings of the aircraft could well have been rehearsals. For something else. The theory had analysts sitting up all over the place.
A week before Stratton’s visit to Washington DC a name surfaced, through British sources in Yemen. Someone had identified a possible missile provider. The name was Tajar Sabarak, a Saudi Arabian businessman. A name previously unknown to Western intelligence organisations. Sabarak was known to the Yemeni and Saudi authorities but as a petty smuggler who had so far eluded both countries’ authorities. He made his income out of the legitimate transportation of khat leaf from Yemen to Somalia. And he was suspected of using his international network to traffic, on occasion, in blood diamonds.
The breakthrough came when MI6 sources in Yemen reported that Sabarak had met with representatives of people who a year earlier had shown up as being interested in purchasing ground-to-air missiles. Shortly afterwards, Sabarak began flying around the world, several of those trips to Hong Kong and Indonesia, nowhere that had anything to do with the buying and selling of the amphetamine khat leaf or blood diamonds. But when it came to places like Indonesia, plausibly everything to do with Muslim extremism. A sting operation was planned to try and entrap the Saudi into selling his missiles. And even though it failed, what it revealed, on secret recordings of meetings, was a man clearly obsessed with global jihad.
It was enough to trigger a reaction stronger than just the need for more clandestine information gathering, said the MI6 man. The SIS decided to bring Sabarak in for questioning. The decision was based on the feeling that it would be better to have Sabarak in custody than put him under surveillance in the hope of finding the weapons and then risk losing him. It was believed that whatever the jihadists were planning, it had in some way already begun.
While Stratton was landing in DC, Sabarak was flagged arriving by air from Saudi Arabia into Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. From there he took a domestic flight to Riyan on the south coast. Before leaving Sana’a, Sabarak placed a call to a Somali in Riyan, a man named Mustafa Jerab, a man with strong ties to Al-Shabaab, an Islamic terrorist group. Stratton knew all about Al-Shabaab. Based in Somalia. No small-time organisation. In just a few years it had grown from a little-known gang of fanatics into a membership of tens of thousands and control of almost half the country.
Sabarak’s phone conversation was recorded and sent to MI6 by a British spy operating within the Yemeni Secret Service. Sabarak and Jerab talked like business associates. They said nothing specific but the inference was quite clear to the British intelligence translator. Sabarak wanted to discuss the shipment of something highly sensitive.
Stratton’s task was straightforward enough, the MI6 man said. He was to go to Riyan with one other operative and two Gurkha special forces support staff, snatch Sabarak and take him to the Oman border seven hours away by road, where British intelligence staff, with the nod from the Omani authorities, would take the Saudi away for a long rest and some very intensive interviews.
The MI6 man stopped talking. He picked up a phone and made an internal call. He needed a car out front right away.
Stratton’s ride took him back to his hotel to pick up his belongings. From there it took him over the Anacostia river to Bolling Air Force Base, where he was met by a senior US Air Force officer whose job it was to escort him through the camp’s bureaucracy and take him to a waiting aircraft.
Judging by the schedule Stratton had been given, he didn’t have a lot of time to get to the UK