Chapter 7 - The Informant
They found Faris Haddad's file through a back channel.
It was not a Navy file. It was a file held by a different agency — one that Maya was not supposed to know the name of and had learned, over the course of a deployment, from a combination of public documents and careful listening.
Haddad had been an informant for three years. He had provided information on a smuggling network that moved weapons through the Gulf of Oman. He had been handled by a case officer who had been based in Amman. He had been paid $4,000 a month. He had a wife and three children in Zarqa.
He had been on the trawler because the case officer had asked him to be.
The Mariam had been carrying a shipment of weapons that were supposed to be photographed and documented. Haddad had been on board to identify the network's mid-level figures. The case officer had known the trawler was at risk. The case officer had coordinated with the Navy for a rapid response if something went wrong.
The rapid response was supposed to be the Dunmore.
The Dunmore had been told to hold position.
Faris Haddad had been shot in the water at 15:06. His body had been recovered by a fishing boat at 16:14. His wife had been notified by the case officer, in person, in Amman, three days later. His children had been told that their father had died in a car accident.
Maya read the file in silence. She read it a second time.
Then she looked at Ben.
"Somebody needs to answer for this," she said.
Ben nodded.
"Somebody needs to answer for this," he said. "But not you. Not like this."
"What do you mean?"
"Chen, you're a first-class petty officer. You're not an officer. You're not NCIS. You're not the IG. If you go after Sloane by yourself, you're going to get crushed. What you need is a chain." Ben tapped the file. "You need somebody above Sloane who can't be fired by Sloane. You need the Inspector General. You need a congressman. You need a reporter who isn't going to get the story killed. And you need all three of them to move at the same time, so nobody can slow-walk one of them while the others are still moving."
Maya closed her eyes.
"Chief," she said, "how do you know all this?"
May you like
Ben was quiet for a moment.
"Because I did it once before," he said. "Twenty-two years ago. In a different Navy. And I got it wrong."
