Locked On by Clancy Tom; Greaney Mark

Author:Clancy, Tom; Greaney, Mark
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101566466
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2011-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

26

Brigadier General Riaz Rehan of the Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous Division of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate cut an impressive figure in the back of his silver Mercedes sedan. A lean and healthy forty-six years old, Rehan was nearly six-two, and his round face was adorned with an impressive mustache and a trim beard. He wore his military uniform on most occasions when he was in Pakistan and he looked intimidating in it, but here in Dubai he looked no less powerful, dressed in his Western business suit and regimental tie.

Rehan’s property here was a walled two-story luxury garden villa with four bedrooms and a large pool house. It sat at the end of a long curved road on Palm Jumeirah, one of five man-made archipelagos off the coast of Dubai.

Coastal property in Dubai used to be markedly scarcer, as nature blessed the Emirate with only thirty-seven miles of beaches, but the leader of Dubai did not see the geographical realities of his nation as geographical boundaries, so he began crafting his own changes to their coastline through the reclamation of land from the sea. When the five planned archipelagos were completed, more than five hundred fifty miles of coast would be added to the nation.

As General Rehan’s luxury vehicle turned onto al Khisab, a residential road of stately homes that also, when viewed from high altitude, served as the top-left frond of a palm-tree-shaped man-made island, Rehan took a call on his mobile. The caller was his second-in-command, Colonel Saddiq Khan.

“Good morning, Colonel.”

“Good morning, General. The old man from Dagestan is here now.”

“Extend my apologies for the delay. I will be there in minutes. What is he like?”

“He is like my crazy old grandfather.”

“How do you know he does not speak Urdu?”

Khan laughed. “He is in the main dining room. I am upstairs. But I doubt he speaks Urdu.”

“Very well, Saddiq. I will meet with him and then send him on his way. I have too much to do to listen to an old man from the mountains of Russia yell at me.”

Rehan hung up and looked at his watch. His Mercedes slowed on the small street to let a car from the protection detail that had been following it pass and rush ahead to the house.

Rehan always traveled abroad with a security detail one dozen strong. They were all ex–Special Services Group commandos, specially trained for bodyguard work by a South African firm. Still, even with this large entourage, Rehan found a way to move in a relatively low-profile manner. He ordered his men to not pack his car with bodies; instead his driver and his lead personal protection agent rode with him, just three men in his SUV. The other ten normally stayed with them in traffic, moving around them like spokes to a hub in their unmarked and unarmored sedans.

A general in the Pakistani Defense Force, even one seconded to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, would not normally operate from a safe house abroad, especially one with an address as opulent as Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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