Act of War (6 page)

There was absolutely no way such a thing could be done without risking exposure. The plan’s success depended upon the United States and the rest of the world believing that the attack had been committed by Al Qaeda terrorists. If anything at all hinted at China’s involvement, the entire operation would be undone.

There were two key reasons Shi and his people had picked September for the attack. The first was the most obvious. A strike on the September 11 anniversary would automatically be blamed on Al Qaeda. It would be the only evidence most people needed in order to levy blame.

The other reason was that the strike Shi had planned would create absolute chaos in the U.S. But to maximize that chaos, they needed to hit before America’s crops were harvested. If they did, famine would take hold over the winter and the die-off of American citizens would be accelerated.

Despite these excellent reasons, the politicians on the Politburo Standing Committee had convinced themselves of a “better” idea—postpone the attack until Chinese New Year.

It was one of China’s biggest national holidays, and millions of Chinese from around the world returned for the event every year. The United States wouldn’t think twice about influential Chinese doing the same. Shi disagreed.

While it might not draw attention before the attack, it definitely would afterward. It wouldn’t matter if the United States government was in a shambles. Every intelligence agency around the globe would be trying to figure out what had happened. The timing of the attack would be one of the key things they’d be looking at. That it had taken place during Chinese New Year and so many of China’s America-based VIPs had been miraculously spared wouldn’t go unnoticed. In the intelligence business, there were no such things as coincidences. They were always signs of something more sinister afoot.

Because the men and materials would already be in the United States, postponing the attack until midwinter also meant more time for the attack to be uncovered. The PSC was unswayed. The General Secretary delivered their decision.

Even though the PSC planned to abandon many high-level Chinese executives and diplomats in the U.S., Shi still didn’t like it. Knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and the significance of the anniversary were burned into global consciousness. Using any other date was a mistake. The PSC didn’t care. Shi was ordered to make a New Year’s strike a success.

No matter what time of year, attacking America on its own soil posed special challenges. Security was always elevated and American law enforcement was getting better and better training on what to look for. Even if men and materials could be smuggled into the country and could remain hidden, one American patrol officer could undo everything. In fact, once in the United States, terrorist operatives had more chance of being discovered by a beat cop or state trooper than they did by an FBI or CIA officer.

Shi had studied the histories of the Al Qaeda members sent by Bin Laden to carry out the 9/11 attacks and was fascinated by their brushes with the law and how many clues they had dropped in the run-up to that dramatic day. Examining all of the pieces in the aftermath, he was stunned that the United States hadn’t uncovered the attack. Bin Laden had been extremely lucky. Shi’s plan would also require a certain amount of luck. He decided to set the attack for two days after Chinese New Year.

Once the date had been fixed, he arranged to meet with his colleague who ran one of the PLA’s best hacking units—Unit 61398. It was based
out of a twelve-story building in a run-down neighborhood in Shanghai. Their job would be to populate key jihadist websites with chatter in the run-up to the attack. Anyone investigating afterward would believe all of the signs had been there. Hindsight could always be counted on being twenty-twenty.

As he put the rest of the wheels in motion, Shi worried about the early February attack date. He was concerned about the weather. Snow Dragon was designed as multiple attacks that would be launched simultaneously. If one cell launched before the others, or if any one of the cells simply failed to launch, the entire operation could be undone. He kept wishing there was a way that the Politburo Standing Committee could be made to reverse its decision and agree to his earlier attack plan. Then, something had happened.

N
ASHVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE

W
azir Ibrahim wasn’t stupid. Only a guilty man would ask for a lawyer. If they had anything substantial on him, they would have arrested him already.

“You know what this is, Wazir?” the young detective asked, holding up an official-looking piece of paper. “This is a police report. Your wife claims you roughed her up. What do you have to say about it?”

The Somali man took a deep breath and replied, “It is not true.”

“You’re calling your wife a liar?”

“She does not speak the truth.”

“You didn’t beat her?”

“I did not beat her,” Wazir replied.

The detective smiled. “I think you’re full of shit. You know that?”

The Somali had seen this man’s type before. He was angry, coiled tight inside like a snake. He had become a police officer so he could lord his power over others. He had an inflated sense of self. He held himself out to be a protector of the weak when in reality he had pursued his badge so he could prey upon a sea of others with impunity. Insecure men with a patina of authority could be annoying. Give those same men actual authority and they could be deadly. Wazir had seen it time and again in Somalia. America pretended to be better. Wazir knew different. Men were men no matter what country they called home.

This man named Hoffman possessed a bearing beyond that of a simple police officer, one that he couldn’t immediately place.

“Does it make you a tough guy to beat your wife, Wazir?” Detective Hoffman asked.

“I did not beat my wife, sir.”

Hoffman placed the piece of paper he had been holding back into the folder and removed another. “Does Islam condone the beating of wives, Wazir?”

It was a rhetorical question. The Somali man understood that well enough to know that the detective did not expect a reply.

“For an infidel, I thought I was pretty squared away when it came to Islam and wife-beating.”

Infidel.
It was an interesting choice of words. The detective didn’t refer to himself as a Jew or a Christian. He referred to himself the way Muslims would have referred to him. Wazir could now place the officer’s hostility, his bearing. He had served in the U.S. military and had probably seen combat in a Muslim nation. Maybe he had been shot. Maybe he had seen his comrades die. If so, he was much more dangerous than just an insecure policeman hiding behind a badge.

“The prophet Mohammed’s fathers-in-law slapped his wives Aisha and Hafsa for annoying him, didn’t they?” he asked.

The Somali paused for a moment before nodding.

“When Mohammed heard this, what did he do? He laughed. He thought it was funny.”

Wazir Ibrahim didn’t bother to reply. What the man was saying came from the Hadith.

“One night when Aisha left the house without permission, Mohammed punched her, right in the chest, didn’t he? His
favorite
wife. He struck her so hard that she claimed it gave her great pain. Correct?”

The Somali didn’t answer.

“The Qur’an specifically gives husbands permission to beat their wives, doesn’t it?” Hoffman asked. “So if you beat your wife, you’re only doing what the Qur’an gives you permission and the Hadith supports you in doing, right?”

“I did not beat my wife, sir.”

“Is the wife-beating subject a little boring for you?” the young man said, setting the paper down. “Why don’t we talk about something else?
Let’s talk about what the Prophet Mohammed thought about nine-year-old girls.”

Wazir Ibrahim’s cool expression, along with his confidence that the police had nothing to charge him with, suddenly melted away.

The detective noticed the change instantly. “What’s wrong, Wazir?”

Panic began to build in the Somali’s chest. “We’re not talking about the Prophet Mohammed anymore, are we?”

“No, we’re not,” said the detective. “We’re talking about a group of Somali men from Minneapolis and the underage girls they brought to Nashville for sex. What do you know about it?”

Wazir looked away and replied, “I think I am done answering questions.”

USS
F
LORIDA

P
lacing the hood back over his head, Harvath and the SEALs transported Ahmad Yaqub from the dry deck shelter down into the USS
Florida.

While they moved him, crewmembers were kept out of the gangways. This way, if ever asked, they could testify that they never saw a thing.

Yaqub was put in dry clothes, cuffed to a bunk in a private berth, and covered with blankets. A SEAL corpsman monitored him. When he started to come around, he was given warm soup and hot tea to help bring his core body temperature back up. Once the corpsman gave the okay, Harvath began to interrogate him again from the beginning.

He focused on Ismail Kashgari, the Chinese Muslim who had approached Yaqub for help in staffing the attack on the United States. He was probing for inconsistencies in Yaqub’s story. He pushed him for every detail he could remember: their means of communication; where, when, and how often they had met; how money was exchanged; how much money was exchanged—all of it. Harvath filled half a legal pad with notes.

An hour later, he changed the subject and asked about Khuram Hanjour, the recruiter. He now wanted to know everything he could about him—where he lived, how to contact him, who he associated with, what mosque he went to, anything that could help them paint a better picture.

When he had exhausted the salient details about Hanjour the
recruiter, he handed over the interrogation to a SEAL named Scobell, and stepped out into the gangway.

His mouth was dry and his head was pounding. He needed a handful of aspirin, a bottle of water, and a cup of coffee.

Harvath stuck his head inside the berth next door and asked if any of the SEALs had any Vitamin M, slang in the SEALs for Motrin. One of the men tossed him a bottle.

Harvath shook two pills into the palm of his hand and tossed the bottle back. Thanking the SEAL, he headed down to the submarine’s mess hall.

Entering the mess, he asked for a bottle of water. On the wall was a plaque commemorating the
Florida
for being the first Ohio-class sub to ever fire a Tomahawk cruise missile. At the other end of the room, a group of sailors were watching one of Harvath’s favorite westerns—
The Magnificent Seven
with Steve McQueen. He remembered someone telling him that it was the second-most-shown film in U.S. television history, second only to
The Wizard of Oz.

In the Navy, you ended up watching any and every movie ever made. There wasn’t much else to do if you were under way and not on shift. While Harvath had seen
The Magnificent Seven
plenty of times in the Navy, the first time he ever saw it was with his father.

It was playing in a small movie theater in San Diego that occasionally revived popular Westerns. He and his father had driven across the bay from their home on Coronado one Saturday afternoon to see it. Harvath had been about nine years old at the time.

The film followed a team of gunslingers hired to protect a small Mexican village from marauders. The villagers were farmers and didn’t know how to fight. The gunslingers taught them.

Harvath’s father was a SEAL and the movie was a great metaphor for what they did. It helped Harvath better understand his father. It was full of great dialogue, with more than a few poignant lines.

Sitting there in the dark, Harvath watched his dad silently recite line after line by heart. It had a profound impact on him.

They returned together over the next three Saturdays. It was the happiest he could ever remember being, sitting alone in the dark with his dad. They weren’t sports guys and they couldn’t talk very much about
what his dad did for a living, but they had movies, and especially, this movie.

By the time Harvath was seventeen, he had seen
The Magnificent Seven
more than two dozen times. He now knew all of the lines by heart as well. Some took on greater meaning for him as he grew older, but one in particular resonated with him after his father had died in a training accident and Harvath had become a SEAL himself.

Many of the villages he passed through around the world reminded him of the one in the movie. There were always children and they were always fearless. They gawked at the weapons he and his teammates carried and wanted to touch all of their equipment.
What’s this do? What’s that do?
The questions were always the same and the children sported smiles that seemed outsized for the squalid conditions they were living in.

While the SEALs were indeed a novelty in most of the places they were dispatched, the children in particular were drawn to them, often to the exclusion of their own families. While this was problematic for obvious operational reasons, there was also a balance that needed to be maintained. If not careful, the SEALs could have been seen as stealing the thunder of the village men, which wasn’t their intention and could have disastrous consequences. The SEALs needed their cooperation, not their resentment.

In one village, a young boy had told Harvath that he wanted to be a brave warrior like him someday, not a coward like his father who was
just
a farmer. Via his interpreter, Harvath admonished the little boy right in front of all the others. Just as Charles Bronson had done in the film, he told the little boy that carrying a gun wouldn’t make him a man; carrying responsibility was what would make him a man.

He explained that the men of their village were truly brave. They cared for their families, they went out to their fields and worked hard every single day, not knowing if they were going to be able to provide enough to eat, yet they worked their hardest nonetheless because their families were counting on them.
That
was courage.