Gauntlet (54 page)

A
T THE PWS TESTING FACILITY, Yousseff had ordered the two teenagers, Javeed and Massoud, to pick up their pace. He didn’t care about their religious sensibilities or what they were there to do. All he cared about was having the unwrapping and packing process finished, so that he could get out of the way.

“It must be evenly packaged,” said Kumar. “There can be no spaces or holes. The slightest deviation will affect the cutting power.”

They had been at it for another half hour, taking the red cellophane wrapping off each brick, and squeezing the putty-like substance into the interior of the Ark, when a rustle in the rear of the cube truck caught Yousseff’s attention.

“What the devil–” he started to say. Before he could finish, a woman, in shorts and a T-shirt, and black from head to toe, appeared in the rear of the truck, jumped down, did a U-turn, and ran, at a very quick rate of speed, down the gravel road that led from the facility. It was Corporal Catherine Gray, making her bolt for freedom.

Yousseff was so shocked that it took him a moment to recover. Then he started barking instructions. “Ba’al, take my truck. Get her back now. If she gets away she’ll ruin the plan. Go now!” Yousseff tossed Ba’al the keys. “There is a small Beretta in the central console. Get her back, or kill her.”

He looked around at the rest of the crew, standing with mouths agape. “The rest of you keep working. We can’t deviate from the plan. Ba’al will get her back.”

“How on earth did she get in there?” asked Kumar.

“Good question. Izzy, would you mind telling me why a woman was hiding in the back of your van?” asked Yousseff, his tone edgy.

“Must’ve been at Devil’s Anvil,” responded Izzy. “She was covered in what looked like coal dust, which means she was probably wriggling through one passage or another at that mine. When we were loading the truck, she must have stolen her way onboard. Ba’al and Dennis brought the explosives through Devil’s Anvil in four loads while I stayed with the truck. Each load took about an hour, from beginning to end. I guess she got onboard, underneath the tarps, probably between loads three and four. We were almost done, and they probably weren’t paying attention like they should’ve been.”

“Why didn’t you check the load, and the tarps, before you left?” asked Yousseff, angrily.

“We should have, Youss. We didn’t. Didn’t expect this. We were in the middle of nowhere — who knew that there’d be some woman wandering around? Anyway, we’re almost 30 miles from civilization, and far from cell phone range. She can’t get far. Ba’al has a truck and a gun. I mean, how far can you run?” asked Izzy, not familiar with Catherine’s athletic history.

“Keep working, and fast, all of you,” ordered Yousseff. “If she gets to a telephone before the sub is in the water, this mission, after incredible risk and cost, is doomed.”

Izzy had known Yousseff for almost 40 years. There had been many, many tricky situations, where they were foiled by the river police, or attacked by pirates, or dealt with a crew mutiny, or even had a problem on the Vancouver or Manzanillo docks. He had never seen Yousseff angry or losing his composure. Yousseff was able to talk himself out of almost anything. He seemed to delight in using his prescient intelligence to wiggle out of distressing circumstances. But when Yousseff saw the woman jump out of the truck, he was as close to furious as Izzy had ever seen him. Izzy wondered again exactly what they were involved in.

A
S YOUSSEFF and his Pashtun crew continued unwrapping brick after brick of Semtex, Ba’al drove south, looking for the strangely clad American woman. There she was. Five minutes had passed and she was already more than half a mile down the road.

He hit the accelerator. The truck shot forward, and in moments he was directly behind her.

“Stop now, or I’ll shoot,” he barked.

He saw her slow, looking as though she was going to stop. He got out of the truck and started walking toward her. He was 30 feet from her when, rather than stopping, she sprinted away at what Ba’al considered to be an astounding speed. Little did he know that the woman ahead of him was a Canadian, with an extraordinary level of physical fitness; a woman who could run the 100-meter in under 12 seconds, and who could and did run half a dozen marathons a year, invariably in less than three hours. After being cooped up for almost 24 hours, the sensation of physical movement was giving her feet wings, and increasing her speed even more.

“Damned bitch,” cursed Ba’al. He fired a shot in her general direction, and then hurried back to the truck to continue the chase. “Should’ve driven right over her.”

Catherine’s thoughts were racing. She was not panicked, and was feeling exhilarated in the open air after spending so long in the back of a cube truck with more than four tons of Semtex, no light, and some coolers containing a few cans of pop and beer. But she knew that she couldn’t outrun the truck. The driver’s next tactic would be to simply run her down, but she was already 100 feet farther down the road when Ba’al clambered back into the truck. She darted off the traveled portion of the roadway and threw herself into a shallow ditch, praying that the driver would not see her.

She smiled as the Ford crew-cab went roaring by. Yes, he’d be back, but for now she had some time to think.

The early morning sky was still inky black. There was no moon, and the sky was overcast. Without the background glow of city lighting, visibility was almost nonexistent. In pulling herself out of the ditch into the dead black night, Catherine was struck by a flash of inspiration. Yes, she knew how she could even up the odds.

She saw the truck turn around and start back when it was more than a mile away. Ba’al had obviously concluded that his quarry had successfully eluded him, and was slowly coming back, looking at the ditches and woods on both sides of the road. His bright lights illuminated the entire road, extending outward for several feet into the brush. Catherine held the large chunk of rock that she had found in the ditch at the ready, unsure of exactly how this was going to play out.

“Come on, big boy,” she said as the lights from the Ford slowly approached. “Come to mama.”

Ba’al was driving very slowly, taking time to survey both sides of the graveled roadway. One hundred feet. Sixty. Forty. Twenty. Ten...

In one quick and athletic move, Catherine launched herself out of the ditch, rock in hand, and smashed in the driver’s side headlight. Jumping backward and rotating, she managed to damage the passenger side headlight as well. It made a fizzling noise, and then went out. Before Ba’al could reach for the gun lying on the passenger seat beside him, Catherine was running by the passenger side and sprinting, again at top speed, up the road in the opposite direction.

Ba’al cursed when he realized what had happened. He still had his parking lights, and one signal light, but, for the rest, he might as well have been driving blind. It was still only 4:30AM, and the dawn would not be upon them for another hour and a half.

“Shit,” he cursed emphatically. “Shit, shit shit.”

Ba’al turned the large pickup truck around on the narrow gravel road, mowing down bushes and small trees in his way, and then proceeded up the road at a speed of 15 miles an hour. He drove for a few minutes, looking both ways, before he realized that she had again given him the slip. He cursed more violently, this time in Urdu, and then in several other Pakistani languages, before turning around and heading back toward the test facility. Before he realized what was going on, the same thing happened again. The woman flew past him at a dead run, streaking back up the road in the opposite direction.

Catherine, for her part, was beginning to enjoy this game of cat and mouse. She could hear the Ford coming, and its four-way flashers and orange parking lights were still on and extremely visible. When it was within 100 feet or so, she ran for the ditch, or some other formation of rock or trees, to take cover. She would stay there until the truck turned around, and when it passed by, would get back on the road and sprint for all she was worth, running anywhere between a quarter and a half mile up the road. When she heard the truck turning around again, she would head for cover. He couldn’t spot her without his lights. There was no way he’d catch her, if this kept up.

Four-thirty became five, and by 5:30AM Catherine knew that this particular phase of the battle would soon be over. A thin ribbon of pink was appearing over the eastern horizon, and by six headlights would no longer be required. As Catherine was deliberating her options, and looking for another roadside stream with which to quench her thirst, she felt the “whomp” of a distant explosion. She saw smoke in the northeastern sky, presumably the location of the building from which she had run. A few minutes later she saw a small convoy of trucks go by, heading toward the Ford on the road ahead of her. In the lead was the cube van that had been her home for the past twenty-some hours, followed in turn by two larger trucks. The vehicles were not going slowly, given the nature of the roadway. They were obviously in a hurry to get away. Fifty miles an hour or more, she estimated. After they passed, she climbed back onto the road and started running at an easy and relaxed pace toward what she hoped would be civilization, wary of any approaching traffic.

B
Y FIVE IN THE MORNING they had been ready for the final phase. The Semtex had almost all been packed into the Ark. Kumar went to the outbuilding and started the second, larger Genset to supply additional power to the overhead crane. He returned and positioned himself behind the controls of the gantry system. He then used it to “close the lid.” It was an extremely tricky operation, with all the men positioned along the base of the Ark, trying to ensure that there was no slippage. Once this had been accomplished, a series of lever latches were used to clamp the lid to the base.

Next Kumar, with the assistance of Izzy and Yousseff, threaded the two large slings from the gantry underneath the Ark. When the Ark appeared to be appropriately balanced, it was slowly pulled aloft, and maneuvered so that it was directly above the Pequod. The steel in the gantry crane system groaned under the weight of the heavy and fully loaded Ark. For a moment Kumar wondered if he had underestimated the carrying capacity of the system, but the crane held. He gradually lowered it so that the bottom of the Ark was parallel with, and directly above, the Pequod. The Pequod itself had been pushed across a ramp and roller system, and was floating in the water that ran along the front and center portion of the facility. The structure of the Pequod was not robust enough to carry the weight of the Ark and its contents, unless it was in the water, where buoyancy would make the chore feasible. But before the Ark could be so positioned, the passenger cockpit of the vessel would need to be closed, and before that, Massoud and Javeed would need to be inside. It was time.

Y
OUSSEFF MOTIONED TO MASSOUD AND JAVEED. The moment of denouement was at hand. Yousseff had seen a lot of death over the past forty-some years. His childhood and teenage years had been marred by the war, death, and destruction brought on by Soviet aircraft, through civil wars, and through the reign of murderous warlords in the Northwest Frontier Province. He had seen thousands of people die in battles in and around Kabul and Khandahar. But the certain death of these two boys troubled him more than anything else ever had. Perhaps it was the ugly set of circumstances that had brought these two individuals to this place. Even though they were both set on their suicide mission, Yousseff could see that there was a deeply subdued, but as yet unextinguished, ember of life in their eyes. Or perhaps Yousseff had overestimated himself. While he was a capable and even brutal drug smuggler and businessman, this situation had put him in the business of terrorism. He wondered if those were shoes he could actually fill.

He tried to shake these thoughts. It was too late to turn back now. And this mission would happen, eventually, with or without his involvement.

“It’s time, boys,” he said. “It’s time. You must now focus on the mission that the Emir, peace be upon him, has given you. Allah has brought you to this hour, and this place.” Yousseff was speaking in the Pashtun tribesman’s version of Urdu that the two boys had grown up with. It wasn’t to give the boys comfort, since he didn’t feel it was his place. It was to make sure that they understood every word of their mission. He quickly outlined their directions, making sure that his words were precise and detailed. Any mistake on their part would mean a failure in the mission; because of the gamble he had taken, a failure would destroy what he had been working toward for his entire life. This made his words even sharper than he meant them to be.

The two boys nodded, but did not reply to his brisk tone. Massoud, and then Javeed, stepped into the narrow two-person cockpit of the high-tech vessel. They had never been in it before, but the simulator in Long Beach had duplicated the conditions and the instrumentation in its cockpit precisely. Kumar and his team had equipped the Pequod with an exotic GPS-linked sonar system that reproduced, in three dimensions, the contours of the reservoir floor. The craft also had powerful running lights and TV cameras, linked to a series of displays similar to the HUD’s carried by all modern fighter aircraft. Between the HUD, the forward-contour modeling, and the view available to the occupants of the vessel, navigating the Pequod was pretty much a walk in the park. The simulator had reproduced these conditions perfectly, and the two teenagers were as comfortable here as they would have been walking along an alley in Jalalabad. They settled in, and nodded their readiness to the men around them.

The cockpit of the Pequod slid shut noiselessly. Yousseff motioned to Kumar to begin lowering the Ark onto the roof of the Pequod. A series of hydraulically operated clamps were positioned along its roofline, with a further series of recessed sockets in the steel base of the Ark to match. A perfect fit was required to ensure good connectivity for the power supplied by the Pequod, at the appropriate moment, to the copper firing rods of the Ark.

Kumar held his breath. His engineers had told him that this was the most dangerous aspect of the mission. If the Ark were lowered too quickly, it would create too great a downward force on the Pequod, which could be crushed. Would it be such a bad thing if it were? he wondered. His reservations about the mission were becoming stronger and stronger, and for a moment he paused, thinking about how his actions right now could change the events to follow. But he maintained his composure, and kept the Ark’s descent slow and steady. The sub sank as the weight of the Ark was lowered onto her roof. There were audible creaks and groans of metal bulkheads becoming stressed. Kumar winced at the sound and nervously bit his lip. At the instant that the roof of the Pequod was level with the waterline, the hydraulic clamps clicked into place. The match was perfect, and the now-united combination of Ark and Pequod dropped slowly from view. Kumar’s hands eased a bit on the controls of the crane; it had worked. Yousseff motioned to Izzy to open the outer doors of the facility, which were at water level.

For a few seconds, they could see the outline of the Pequod in the early dawn light. But as it pulled away, and descended, it disappeared from view. It was 6AM, local time.

Yousseff and Izzy quickly walked to one of the walls of the facility and picked up the containers of gasoline that had been lined up there. Yousseff directed Izzy to splash gasoline about the facility. He himself opened four barrels of the diesel used for the Gensets, and poured the contents out onto the floor. He then poured a trail of gasoline from the interior of the test facility to Izzy and Ba’al’s cube van. He ordered Izzy to pull the van ahead a few hundred feet, then told Ray and Jimmy to do the same with their vehicles. He walked behind the two trucks and the van, spilling gasoline on the ground as he did so. Kumar climbed out of the crane and joined him.

“Kumar, get in. Iz, you’re driving. Hustle now. Time to move, here,” Yousseff shouted. He ordered the two larger trucks to follow the cube van.

As Yousseff reached the van, he flipped open a matchbox, struck a match, and tossed it into the gas trail. They watched the flame jump forward to enter the facility, then sped out of the driveway. The building exploded just as the three trucks pulled out of sight.

I
T WAS 7AM. The Pequod had been in the water for an hour. Massoud and Javeed talked little. Occasionally they spoke of their boyhood in Khandahar, of their dreams, and sometimes even of their dead parents, brothers, or sisters. Navigation was easy. The underwater route had been mapped years earlier by a joint venture between PWS, the Federal government, and a number of universities. The undersurface contours had been fed into the Pequod’s HUD, and following those contours was easy. The same contours had been programmed into the simulator back at the Long Beach PWS manufacturing center.

With the heavy weight of the Ark riding on the sub’s shoulders, their maximum speed was ten knots. Most of the engine’s power was diverted to two vertical propellers mounted beneath the Pequod, to prevent the craft from sinking into the reservoir’s floor. Occasionally a solitary fish, or a small school of them, darted across their field of vision. The Pequod was following a course along the reservoir bottom, and was as deep as she could be without actually scraping the lakebed itself. “Stay low, boys. Stay low,” Yousseff had said. The minutes slid by in the silent subsurface wonderland.

F
IVE MILES SOUTH of the facility, Yousseff, Kumar, and Izzy came across Ba’al and his lightless truck. He was still looking for the woman.

“Where is she, Ba’al?” asked Yousseff, leaning out of the passenger side window of the cube van.

Ba’al looked harried and tired. “She is out there someplace,” he said, pointing toward the woods. “She took out my lights, and we’ve been playing cat and mouse ever since.”

Yousseff thought for a moment. He shook his head, dismissing her as unimportant. “We need to get rid of the van here. It can be traced. We’ll push it off the edge, into the river. It’s important that it be discovered by the American police forces. It’s important for the cover-up.”

Yousseff got out of the van and walked toward Ray’s large truck. “We’re going to drop the van into the water here. My associates and I are going directly to the airport. You and your assistant here need to get yourselves back onto the 15, and get back to the Los Angeles warehouse immediately. You drop the truck off there, and get back to your normal lives.”

“That’s it?” asked Ray.

“That is all the Emir requires. Stay here until we dump the van.” Yousseff walked back toward the second truck, operated by Sam.

“As soon as we’re done here, I want you to follow the Ford and stay at the directed spot near the main access road, understood?”

“Yes sir,” said Sam.

“Sam,” Yousseff continued, “remember the timing. It has to be 8:45AM exactly. After the explosion, you must stay for at least ten minutes, to ensure that the images are being transmitted. Is the equipment in order? Is the video working? And the satellite uplink?”

“Yes, it’s all in order. We spent the past half hour checking and testing everything one last time. Everything is perfect.” The smaller of the two trucks, which had carried the Ark, also carried with it state-of-the-art television and satellite uplink equipment.

“Good,” said Yousseff. “When it’s set up, come to the airport. We’ll be waiting for you there. Make sure that the camera catches the explosion. The destruction must be captured on camera.”

“Yes sir,” said Sam, giving Yousseff a nod.

Yousseff did not tell him that he had no intention of waiting. He didn’t say that within 15 minutes the Lear would be winging its way back to California, where the faster Gulfstream was now ready and waiting in the Long Beach hangar. Nor did he tell Sam or his swamper that by 9:05AM they would both be dead. That might have complicated things.

Yousseff walked back toward the crew-cab and Ba’al.

“What about the woman?” asked Ba’al.

“Can she identify you?” responded Yousseff.

“Possibly,” responded Ba’al. “She was probably watching us reload the explosives at Devil’s Anvil. If she’s with the RCMP, or the FBI, or the American police, she will have been trained in making ID’s. Yes, she may well be able to ID both Izzy and myself. Maybe you too, and Kumar and the rest of the crew, depending on how much she saw back there.” He motioned back to the burning facility they had just come from.

“We don’t have time to chase her down,” responded Yousseff. “Besides, you’ll be back in Jalalabad before the Americans know what hit them. We’re more than 30 miles from the airport. By the time she gets to a phone, we’ll be long gone. And with the false trails we’ve planted, they’ll never sort it out. We’ll just have to leave her.”

They turned to walk back to the cube van, where Izzy and Kumar were waiting for further instructions. Yousseff handed Ba’al the large chunk of rock he’d just picked up. “Put the vehicle in drive, and toss this rock on the gas pedal. Get ready to jump back, Ba’al, or you may lose a set of toes, or worse.”

Ba’al peered over the cliff edge, and, in the gathering daylight, saw the black waters 100 feet below him. No, he didn’t want to go in that direction.

“Hold on for one minute,” said Yousseff. He opened a small briefcase that he had brought with him. Within the case was a sealed plastic bag. He put on a pair of gloves, also hidden in the briefcase, and opened the bag. Inside was a copy of the Koran and a poorly forged passport in the name of Raymond Hillel, listing the man’s Los Angeles address. He flipped open the van’s glove compartment and dropped the book and passport in.

“On the count of three,” Yousseff said. Izzy and Kumar had been looking down at the water, but now joined him behind the van. They all put their shoulders against the back of the vehicle.

Yousseff started the count, and Ba’al put the gear into drive as the van drifted slowly forward. On three, Ba’al placed the rock on the accelerator and sprang back in one motion. The van surged forward, smashed through a low metal guardrail, and plummeted down toward the waters, landing with a gigantic splash and disappearing beneath the surface.

“Ba’al, Izzy, take that section of guardrail hanging over the edge, and make it a little more obvious. We want the American authorities to find this as soon as possible. We need the false trail to stand out,” Yousseff directed.

Ba’al and Izzy did as they were ordered, but gingerly, keeping wary eyes on the cliff edge and the water raging below. After placing the briefcase in the Ford, Yousseff and Kumar moved to help, and between the four of them they were able to bend and pull a second section of damaged guardrail so that it was swaying in the wind, high above the waters of the reservoir. The damage was obvious, and the authorities would find it within hours.

The four of them regarded their handiwork for a second and then, as one, turned and headed toward the idling crew-cab. With Kumar driving, they continued on their speedy southward course, leading the other two trucks. Within 20 minutes they reached the highway. Yousseff was pleased to see that Ray turned left and headed in the direction of the Interstate, going back to LA. He also saw Sam stop by the side of the road. The plan was unfolding just as it was meant to. It was 7:30AM.