Free Countdown to Mecca by Michael Savage Page A

potatoes,” Jack said. “They’re not quite like the radical Islamists who want to drag this country back two hundred years then stick a saber in its gut. No, the big story here may be the CIA. There’s a possibility that Der Warheit Unternehmen is unwittingly being used by the West to sabotage the Iran program. Our tech guys have done this before, most famously with the Iranian centrifuges that suddenly went haywire.”
    â€œYou still got your contact on the inside?” Doc asked.
    Jack nodded. “I knew we’d never let potentially dangerous equipment just sail into a hostile nation unless we had a reason for it being there.”
    â€œLike bugs planted to send us information or malware to make it all go bad after billions of enemy dollars have been invested,” Sol said.
    â€œRight,” Jack said. “So I called Kevin Dangerfield. He’s a former deputy director, now retired. I explained the situation and, knowing that Kevin would never give away classified information, I asked for a simple yea or nay on whether my suspicions were solid.”
    â€œLet me guess,” Doc drawled. “Yea.”
    Jack nodded. “Only this time there’s something even stranger going on,” Jack said grimly, turning back to the editing program’s monitor. “I found my way to a series of stories on the Pakistan bomb program, which had also received at least some clandestine help from Western companies. There were a few video documentaries on that program, which is why we’re here. We need to play out this thread to see if it links up with Firebird somewhere.”
    â€œWhere’s the potential crossover?” Doc asked.
    â€œPulkovo,” Jack said. “The airport is pictured as a transit point in the video. That’s also where that downed Russian plane took off.”
    â€œThin,” Doc said.
    â€œWhich is why I want to see if it fattens up,” Jack said.
    â€œRun the video,” Sol told him, intrigued.
    For the next forty-six minutes the three watched intently. Although he didn’t understand the words, Jack knew that documentary making was an art, not a science; the images, their sequence, and the way they played off the narrative were as important as the journalism itself. Jack again found himself silently setting his own narrative to the images, even as he analyzed why the piece worked. One of the big reasons was the minimum of talking heads. The experts were always interviewed doing something, and the camera wandered around the environment they were in—focusing more than once on baby pictures, he noted.
    When the documentary ended, Jack turned to the others. “Anything jump out?”
    Sol grimaced. “The airport is a transit point, security porous as hell it seems. Also, one of the guys depicted is Schoenberg’s brother Marius.”
    â€œHis job?” Doc asked.
    â€œUseless playboy,” Sol said. “But he could be a courier. No one takes him seriously.”
    Jack felt a pang as he thought about his own brother.
    â€œOther than that the documentary’s standard stuff,” Sol said. “It’s all, ‘We need advanced weapons technology because the West will conquer us if we don’t have it.’”
    â€œYou got that from just their expressions?” Doc asked.
    â€œI know a few words of Arabic,” Sol replied. “You got to, in my line of work.”
    â€œCan you press Schoenberg to open up a little more about his operation?” Jack asked.
    â€œI can make him an offer he can’t ‘refuse.’” He spoke the word so it meant “trash,” not “denial.”
    Jack laughed and Sol clapped Doc on the shoulder. “The American headquarters of Schoenberg’s company has got plenty of shredded refuse,” he explained. “Somebody trustworthy has to haul it.”
    Doc shook his head at the tentacles Sol had in seemingly every strata of