Team Thirty

By Donald Simmons

president barack obama, after setting out his 'red line' for the development of nuclear devices by iran, has tasked the cia, with the cooperation of Britain's mi-6, and the prime minister of israel to determine the status of iran's program. he authorizes the use of sabotage, espionage, assassination and international intimidation to hinder iran's progress. after learning with certitude from an informer in the highest reaches of the Iranian government that iran has in its possession at least one nuclear device, the president has to make a decision as to how to proceed. aware that the american people and the congress were war-weary, how would he deal with the biggest crisis of his presidency?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald Simmons
• Release date: Aug 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301530021

Donald Simmons

I was introduced to creative writing while attending San Jose State University. Raising a family and operating my business precluded spending much time writing. As time went on I began to write more and more, finally finding my self with four complete manuscripts. Since retiring I've written three more, including DEAR MARTY,.I live in the Pacific Northwest with the love of my life, my wife Jacque. Our children and grandchildren all live within 20 miles of us.

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OTHER WORKS BY DONALD SIMMONS

A Peaceful Revolution

Remembering Tomorrow

Bell Harbor

A Long Neglected Passage

The Coat of a Man

Dear Marty,

Team Thirty

By Donald Simmons

Copyright 2013 by Donald Simmons

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CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS

U.S.A.

Jefferson Tillock: Director C.I.A.

David Trumbull: Deputy Dir. For Spec. Operations

Johnathan Hansen: Dep. Dir. For Nat. Clandestine Serv.

Jim Waters: Member, Team Thirty

Sarah Thomas: Dep. Pol. Off., Amer. Embassy, London

Robert Desplain: C.I.A. St. Ch., Brazil

BRITAIN

Sir James Crankshaw: Dep. Dir., Secret Intel.(MI-6)

Brian Ayres: Member, Team Thirty

ISRAEL

Gen. Elihu Ben-David: P.M.’s Nat’l Sec. Adv.

Col. Gavriel Temerls: Mossad

Rachel Levy: Member, Team Thirty

Benzion Netanyahu: Member Team Thirty

Jasmina Meyer: Mossad

Eli Shinar: Ambassador to Brazil

Natan Hausel: Mossad Stat. Ch., Brazil

Benjamin Lieberman, M.D.: Washington, D.C.

IRAN

Sayyid Ali Khamenei: Supreme Leader

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: President

Gen. Aref Fallahi: C.I.C., Revolutionary Guard

Rear Admiral Jalil Tehrani, Iranian Navy

Adm. Faraz Raad, Chief of Staff, Revolutionary Guard, Navy

Heydar Moslehi: Minister of Intel & Security (Vevak)

Col. Karim Zarindast: Dir. of Intel., Nuclear Program

Khorvash Jamadi: Vevak Agent

Lt. Niyoosha Hirandi: Head of Vevak, Brazil

Dr. Sorush Nikahd: Acquisition Spec., Europe

Dr. Heydar Asgari, Ministry of Energy

SWEDEN

Cmdr. Markus Jannik: Dir. P Sect., SAPO

Edvard Larson: SAPO Agent

Solvig Sixtusson: G.M., Kuehne-Nagel Trucking

Arne Runeberg: Owner, Runeberg Machine Works

GERMANY

Herr Gingrich: Managing Partner, IGLS Chemicals, Inc.

Herr Schultz: Owner, Schultz Metal Refining

BRAZIL

Rodolfo Malheiro: Dir. Gen., ABIN

Jorge Coelho: Ch., Counterintelligence, ABIN

OTHERS

INDIA: Dr. Raja Chatterjee, Ret. Nuclear Physicist

AUSTRALIA: James Martin, Owner, Martin Mechanical

ITALY: Dr. Ottavio Benedetti, Pres. Benedetti Electronics

ONE

Innsbruck, Austria

Saturday January 8, 2011

The short man wore a beige trench coat, a dark green felt fedora, and carried a large briefcase and an umbrella over his arm. The sky was gray and the forecast was for more snow this evening. Occasionally stopping to look into a shop window, using the reflection of the window to view the foot traffic on the opposite side of the street, then moving briskly on towards his destination, arriving at the Weiss Adler Hotel, he entered the front door after looking both ways at the street from where he had just come.

Acknowledging the concierge with a nod, walking briskly to the lone elevator, he pushed the ‘UP’ button and waited for the elevator to come down. Entering, he pushed the button for the fourth floor; arriving, he stepped out and walked to the end of the hall; his room being opposite the stair well; at the door, key in hand, he failed to detect a man emerging from the stairwell wearing a ski jacket, ski powder pants, thin leather gloves and a black woolen cap, holding a Glock 7.92 mm with an attached noise suppression device, who then walked up behind his unsuspecting victim, placing the barrel to the back of the head of the unsuspecting lodger. The man froze, making no attempt to turn around, as he knew what was happening. The first bullet entered the occipital portion of his brain, instantly mushrooming and exiting his head where his nose used to be. The second bullet severed his spinal cord at the atlas bone, and exited at his larynx; the man was dead before he hit the floor.

Taking the room key from the hand of the dead man, the shooter quickly opened the door dragging the dead man and his briefcase into the room closing the door behind him. He then reached into the coat of his victim removing his wallet and passport.

Searching the briefcase, finding a notebook and folded blueprints, he placed them in the small of his back under the ski pants and covered by his jacket. Dropping the weapon onto the victim’s body and returning to the stair well, the assassin returned to the basement where he had parked his rented Volkswagen Bug and drove to the train station, deserting his car and embarked on the 5:00 PM train for Zurich, Switzerland. The five hour train trip allowed him to arrive at the Zurich airport for a short wait before boarding the over-nighter to Boston via Geneva.

Arriving home from his arduous journey through nine time zones twice within seventy-two hours, Jim Waters knew it would take him a couple of days to get his body and more importantly, his circadian rhythm back to normal. A woman was at the airport to take delivery of the material he had collected in Austria, immediately taking a flight to Washington, D.C. to deliver them to the analysts at Langley. If he stayed away from alcohol, caffeine, and slept whenever he needed to, he knew he would adjust much quicker. He preferred to travel only five time zones a day, but he needed to get home as soon as possible.

Upon his arrival at Portland International Airport, he had bought a copy of that day’s Oregonian newspaper finding on the fourth page a small one paragraph synopsis of an AP report about an Iranian scientist who had been assassinated in Innsbruck, Austria. Nothing was known about the man, or the motive of the killer, or killers. The man was registered with Austrian authorities as a trade representative of his government, and was apparently there to negotiate contracts for machine tools with an Austrian manufacturer. No other details were given.

Following the execution of his assignment and before boarding the return train to Zurich, Waters had walked straight to the river running through the middle of the small city dating from the middle ages and making sure he wasn’t being observed, used a cell phone given to him to call a number somewhere in Britain. As usual, he was connected to an anonymous voice mail where he left a one word message; Thirty; then threw the phone into the frigid Inn River.

TWO

Goteborg, Sweden

Wednesday January 12, 2011

Just past 2:30 AM a semi-truck pulled up to the gate of the Soderlind Iron and Machinery Company. The passenger jumped down and opened the unlocked gate; following the truck he then closed the gate not locking it. The driver of the truck backed up to a loading dock, leaving the engine idling as his partner climbed up on the loading dock and started one of three forklifts, traveled down a concrete slope to racks containing various sizes and types of metal pipes and tubes. Knowing precisely the metals rods they were after, as they were the only ones wrapped in heavy cloth; with the aid of the driver lifted them onto the forks of his lift, wheeling the fork lift around and set the twenty foot rods behind the semi now with the rear doors opened. The two men lifted each rod into the trailer using wooden blocks to hold them in position and from rolling around. After all fifty rods were in place the two thieves then replaced the rods with generic carbon steel tubes in similar wrap in the place of the stolen rods, replaced the forklift, opened the gate to exit, carefully closing and making sure to secure the lock. The whole operation took less than thirty minutes, just enough time to miss the security patrol car which drove by every hour, punctually at a quarter past.

What the thieves didn’t know was the rods with which they had absconded were a special material: Low carbon steel alloyed with 2% boron and coated with a mixture of silver, indium and cadmium.

In the meantime, as the truck was making its way to the harbor where a ship was waiting to load the product of the heist, in the resort town of Åre, located to north of Goteborg a murder had just occurred.

The victim, Karl Soderlind, owner of Soderlind Iron and Machine Works, while vacationing at his country/ ski cabin had been attacked, sedated and left hanging by an electrical cord from a beam in his garage. The police, finding his body with an overturned chair below his feet, would rule the 65 year old widower’s death a suicide.

When the killer was finished he drove his rented car west to the city of Trondheim, Norway, a distance of about 90 miles. As the meteorologist had promised, the drive was uneventful as he was between two weather fronts allowing an easy drive. As the Trondheim Airport was located in the nearby town of Hell, he dropped his car off and took a room at the Rica Travel Hotel, planning on catching an early SAS flight to Dublin, Ireland. The next morning after landing in Dublin he had just enough time to catch the daily ferry to Glasgow, Scotland.

On route, looking to the starboard he saw the Isle of Man: Time to call home. Dialing the preprogrammed number answered by an anonymous voice mail, he simple said, Thirty, and then surreptitiously dropped the cell phone into the Irish Sea.

In Glasgow, he caught the Virgin Trains ‘Pendilino’ that evening, traveling First Class, sleeping the entire way to London, and not waking until the train had come to a complete stop.

THREE

Langley, Virginia

Monday April 13, 2010

Jim Waters had lived in Portland, Oregon since his divorce four years ago, having moved from Los Angeles. He had met his wife while working on his doctorate in nuclear physics at Cal Tech; she was a graduate assistant in chemistry. They both agreed after three years that it was never going to work; he traveling around the country and she wanting to teach in her native Chicago.

After moving north Jim was approached in 1996 by the scientific and technical arm of the C.I.A. and offered a job as a technical analyst on nuclear proliferation issues. Having no desire to teach and being too impatient to spend countless years researching a particle whose existence was questionable, Jim took the job with the proviso that he continue to live and work in Portland. Initially hesitant, Spy, Inc. relented and set up his downtown fifth floor condo with secure communications, for both voice and data transmission.

After an initial three month orientation in Langley, Virginia, Waters returned to Oregon and spent weeks perusing reports gathered both illicitly and from public sources. He was surprised to find much of both types of information to be nonsensical, either through the ignorance of the gatherer of the information or purposeful disinformation, having so far, gone undetected. What he needed to see was solid technical evidence of what was truly happening in those places that most concerned the U.S.: Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan and even Iran.

After asking questions of his superiors and being told, We just don’t know, he suggested that he be allowed to go into the field and try to acquire some answers. His bosses readily agreed. Following another three month orientation on diplomatic, illicit and licit procedures for gathering intelligence, Waters began attending technical and scientific conventions, meeting experts from around the world, and garnering intelligence over a steak dinner and a couple bottles of wine that he wouldn’t have otherwise.

Recently Waters was asked to come to Langley for consultation; whatever that was. He was to meet with the Deputy Director for Special Operations, David Trumbull. Waiting in the Trumbull’s outer office that Monday morning he noticed a smartly dressed man also waiting. He wondered if they were to be in the same meeting.

At precisely 9:00 a.m. what appeared to be Trumbull’s administrative assistant, a long-legged brunette with the greenest eyes he’d ever seen came through the door, looked at Waters and then the other fellow; smiling, asked both to follow her. Getting up from their chairs Waters and the other attendee smiled at each other. Waters put his hand out offering,

’Morning, I’m Jim Waters; it appears we’re in this together.

The other man took his hand, smiled and said nothing. In utter silence Miss Green Eyes led them through a large oak door to David Trumbull’s, sanctum sanctorum. Like all the offices on the 7th floor at Langley, furnishings, paintings, and other objets d’art were first rate as they were on loan from the National Gallery to all high mucky mucks in the federal government.

Waters had met Trumbull a couple of times previously. He appeared to be in his early fifties, some gray coming through his brown pate, tanned as though he were a regular golfer or tennis player, sported a wedding ring of the plain gold variety, and had striking blue eyes making Waters think of the Speaker of the House.

Standing up and coming around his desk, Trumbull put his hand out to Waters and then the ‘Silent One’

I want to introduce you two; looking at Waters, Jim Waters, I’d like you to meet your counterpart from Britain’s Special Executive Service, Brian Ayres.

This time besides shaking hands, Ayres actually smiled and said,’

I hope you’ll forgive my reticence in not giving you my name earlier, Jim.

I understand, Brian. I guess I kinda broke protocol by offering mine, heh?

Trumbull looked at both of them then turned to