Esther's Sling (28 page)

A young soldier came running out toward Muhjid. He had been wondering for weeks if his recruitment by al Qaeda was real or was some trick being played by Syrian intelligence to test his loyalty. He knew at this moment that it was real. “Allahu Akbar,” yelled Faraj as he approached Muhjid. The yell was a signal to six of the nine men in and around the machine gun nest. They turned their AK-47 assault rifles on the other three men, who were Shiites, and commanded them to raise their arms. Faraj reached Muhjid, grabbed his
right hand and raised it to his mouth to kiss it.

“Allahu Akbar,” said Abu Muhjid as he hugged Faraj. They kissed each other on the cheeks. The two men in the guardhouse were with Faraj. “Tell your men to take cover
after the truck passes. The fireworks will begin shortly after. And cover your ears.”

“Yes, sir.” Faraj turned to his men and issued orders. The three Shiites were ordered to
lie down inside the emplacement. Guns were trained on them to ensure compliance.

Muhjid removed the small radio transmitter tucked into his pocket. He lifted it to his mouth and pressed the transmit button. “We are good to go. Allah be with you.” He t
urned to get back into the four-door sedan. He paused at the door. “Are you coming?” he asked Faraj.

Faraj ran to get in the back seat behind the driver. The car accelerated down the mile long road to the target building. The road headed due east, roughly paralleling the M20 highway about a half mile to the north. After they were half way down the road, the driver noticed a white van behind them and mentioned it. Faraj turned around. “That is the next shift.”

“Good,” replied Muhjid.

The sedan continued down the road, which curved to the south for the last hundred
meters to the target building. The car slowed and continued past the side of the building, continuing south for another two hundred meters onto the empty tarmac of Palmyra Air Base. They reached the taxiway and turned left to head east, toward the radars. Abu Muhjid looked back over his left shoulder toward the guardhouse that was now over a mile away. He saw the headlights of a truck coming in their direction on the road leading to the building. The truck was just passing the guardhouse. “Speed up,” ordered Muhjid to the driver. He knew how much explosive the truck carried.

The driver understood as well and was soon racing along the taxiway at 120 kph, about as fast as its four c
ylinder engine could get it to.

In the residential neighborhood
, a van had stopped to let five men out at the first of the four side-by-side homes that were marked with an orange “X.” All of the men were armed with AK-47s and wore combat vests with eight additional 30 round magazines and two grenades. One man held a forty pound steel battering ram. They stopped at the first gate as the van drove off. The man with the battering ram, the largest man on the team, swung the ram against the gate handle. The gate gave way. He and two other men ran into the small courtyard and up to the front door. The same man smashed in the door and the other two men ran inside. The man with the battering ram ran back out the gate and over to the next home to repeat the process. All of the men wore the uniforms of the Syrian army – each man wearing the same uniform he had been wearing the day he defected during the prior year.

Inside the first home, a central hallway r
an from the front sitting room past a kitchen and dining room toward two bedrooms – what residents in New Orleans refer to as a “shotgun” layout. The two gunmen moved quickly, glancing to their right and left as they headed towards the rear bedrooms. A bedroom door opened and a man in shorts stepped into the hallway. “What the hell are you doing?” the homeowner yelled.

The lead man froze, raising his AK-47. Then the words he had just heard penetrated his conscious. They had been spoken in Arabic, an Arabic that was in perfect alignment with the local dialect. The man was not Russian. “Where are the Russians?” screamed the lead intruder.

The homeowner saw the uniforms and, more importantly, the AK-47 leveled at his belly. He raised his arms in the air. “There are no Russians here.”

The second
invader walked around the first and told the homeowner to back up. He looked into both bedrooms, which were across the hall from each other. The homeowner’s bedroom had only a very frightened Arab woman. The other bedroom had two small children. “Where do the Russians live?”

“I don’t know. There are some in this neighborhood, but I don’t know where.”

The first intruder spoke. “Forgive us, we are in the wrong home. Who lives next door?” He pointed in the direction of the next home that had been marked.

“My cousin lives there. There are no Russians.”

“Go back to bed.” The two intruders turned to head out the front door.

At the same moment,
Mohammed was maintaining an even speed on the mile long drive to the building. He slowed for the right hand turn to the south. The 2005 Mitsubishi Fuso box van had only two axles, but could still carry up to 4,000 pounds of cargo. This morning, however, it held only 1,400 pounds of RDX explosive along with three 130 millimeter M-46 artillery rounds, all courtesy of a pilfered Syrian army warehouse. As he straightened the wheel, he saw the shuttle van in front of him, with its shift change cargo still exiting. Several people were waiting to board the van. One or two looked up and noticed a small truck heading in their direction. One man in line thought it odd that the truck seemed to be accelerating. He wondered if the driver was experiencing a problem with his gas pedal.

In the cab, Mohammed reached over and grabbed a push button detonator that was taped to the left side of the vacant passenger’s seat. At the same time his right foot pressed down on the pedal. He lifted the detonation trigger in his right hand, mov
ing his thumb onto the plunger.

“Allahu Akbar,” shouted Mohammed as the truck passed just in front of the van. Several of the men waiting to board the van were now running for their lives. They could not run
far enough to save themselves.

The explosion created a shock wave that travelled outward in all directions. Windows were broken in one-quarter of the homes in the town of Tadmur. Almost a mile away, the sedan
that held Abu Muhjid had come to a stop in front of its first target. Inside the small four-door, Muhjid, his new comrade Faraj and their driver shuttered. The sound hurt the ears of each man and the concussion forced each of them to catch his breath.

“Allahu Akbar.” The phrase was repeated frequently by both Faraj and the driver. Faraj prayed silently to God, thanking him for allowing his humble servant to become a holy warrior – allowing him to feel, in that instant, that his life ha
d purpose for the first time.

Muhjid looked back at the rising cloud of grayish-black smoke and dust. Where the building had been, nothing remained. Debris began to fall around the bomb site. Some things landed around the sedan, Muhjid not sure if they were pieces of wood, metal, dirt or human body parts. He shook his head to gather his wits. There was more work to do. He looked out the front window. A Chinese-built JY-27 radar loomed only twenty meters in front of them. Muhjid noticed that two men had run out of a radar control vehicle that was parked off to the right. They were in shock, watching the same growing column of rising smoke
as Muhjid. The al Qaeda commander got out of the car and walked toward them. This time he held his AK-47 in his right hand, the muzzle pointing loosely at the ground as he walked.

The man closest to Muhjid turned to him. “What
just happened?” the man asked.

They were
his last words. Abu Muhjid raised his weapon to his hip and fired a three round burst, the first two rounds hitting the man in the chest. He died quickly. Behind him, the other man began to run. Muhjid raised his weapon to align the sites on his target and squeezed the trigger. The man had made the mistake of running directly away from the Archer in a straight line. He was hard to miss. His body dropped to the earth like the sack of deadweight it had become.

Muhjid turned back to the car. The driver had stepped out. “Get the bag,” he yelled, and then quickly turned to run toward the radar control vehicle that the two now dead men had just exited. He reached the doorway in seconds and jumped up the stairs, his weapon leading the way. He
entered the vehicle’s enclosed control area. No one was inside. He walked up to two large built-in flat panel displays. He fired bursts into each screen and then a burst into the area that looked to him like the main computers controlling the radar. The Archer turned and exited.

As Muhjid stepped back onto the hard desert sand, he noticed that the driver was now holding an olive drab canvas bag in his hand that he had retrieved from the trunk of the sedan. He was already heading towards the radar. Muhjid yelled to Faraj, who was following the driver, to stand watch as they planted C-4 explosives to the base of the radar. It took a few minutes to get the explosives in place. Muhjid set a delay fuse as the driver and Faraj
headed back to the car. After starting the timing device, Muhjid ran to the car and jumped into the passenger seat. “Go, go, go!” he commanded.

Back in the residential neighborhood, the
first two home invaders were almost to the front door when the windows shattered. The home shook as if an earthquake had just hit. But instead of sustained shaking, the impact was sudden and sharp, like being in an auto accident. The sound was louder than anything either man had heard before. Each man said a silent prayer in praise of Allah. The two men could hear screaming and crying from the rear of the house as they exited into the front courtyard and out through the wall to the sidewalk, turning right to see what had happened at the house next door. They stopped at the breached gate and looked into the courtyard to see one of their comrades coming down the front steps. The gunman exiting the house looked at his friends and yelled out, “There are no Russians here.” He was clearly shaken.

“Where’s Abdul?”
asked the first of the two men.

“He’s coming.” The man was white.

“What’s wrong?”

“Abdul killed a child.”

“What?”

“It was dark.” The man just sh
ook his head from side to side.

A moment later, Abdul came running out of the home. “Let’s go,” he screamed. The group went on to the next two homes. There were no Russians living in any of the four houses.

When the explosion occurred, the van from As Sukhnah, which had been carrying nine armed men when it pulled onto the M20 highway an hour earlier, had just finished dropping off the last two gunmen in front of a marked home. The two gunmen paused for a moment to recuperate from the concussion of the explosion and then used a battering ram to break open the gate to the wall. As they stepped through the opening into the courtyard, a European man was walking out of the front door of the home. The European froze when he saw the two Syrian army soldiers in front of him.

The lead gunman raised his AK-47 to his shoulder and fired a single round, hitting the foreigner in the right side of his chest. The victim’s legs buckled and he fell to the ground in a seated lotus position. His eyes contained only fear and astonishment, his mind unable to comprehend the event. The trailing gunman walked around his partner, passed behind the man now seated on the walkway, and bounded up the front steps of the home. The first gunman calmly walked up
to the man on the ground and raised his weapon, the muzzle only a few feet from the head of his target. He fired a single round and the man’s head exploded, the corpse now falling backwards onto the sandy earth that would shortly be soaked in blood. Clumps of skull with hair tissue still attached were scattered in the sand.

Inside the home, which had the same floor plan as the other homes in the neighborhood, the second gunman headed down the hall. A woman came out of one of the bedrooms. She was middle-aged with light brown hair. She had thrown on a bathrobe to go investigate what had happened outside, her imagination assuming something bad but
falling well short of reality.

“Stop,” yelled the gunman as he leveled his weapon at her. “Russian?”

The woman froze in fear, unable to speak.

“Russian?” shouted the gunman. He was stationary, his weapon at his shoulder and pointed at the woman.

A loud and sharp sound startled the gunman – the noise of a rifle round being fired. The woman was hit in the head, the round killing her instantly. The bullet had been fired by the first gunman, who had entered the home after he killed the man outside. He stepped around his partner and walked down the hall. He kicked open the bedroom door opposite the woman’s bedroom and looked in, flipping the selector on his weapon upward one notch with his thumb, enabling full automatic fire. He squeezed the trigger. Twelve rounds were fired before he stopped. A teenage Russian boy now lay dead.

The gunman turned and walked out. As he passed by his partner, he simply said, “I hate Russians. Filthy atheists.”

The other three homes were all entered. They were empty.

The sedan carrying Abu Muhjid, Faraj and the driver turned back around to head back to
the northwest toward the Russian Tall King radar set. As they drove, Muhjid heard metallic pinging. He started to wonder if there was something wrong with the engine of their car. “What is that sound?” he asked to no one in particular. As the last word left his mouth, a round came through the rear window. Muhjid ducked instinctively, his mind suddenly realizing that the sounds he had been hearing were bullets hitting the car. “Floor it,” he yelled to his driver. “Where is that coming from?”