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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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Muhamed Abdallah’s first view of the wall of mountains rising up behind Denver came that night at sunset, and he pressed the fingers of his right hand against the window glass as if he could reach out and touch the snow-capped peaks that seemed so near and yet so distant.
His bus approached from the east on 1-70 after crossing the otherworldly, barren rolling hills of Kansas in the hot afternoon. He had dozed fitfully, waking often in a cold sweat, seeing the Israeli tank that killed his uncle Rafiq, seeing the blood erupting from his body as the heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets tore into his flesh.
On that day the fourteen-year-old Muhamed became a man in the family. Although he did not abandon his studies as his mother feared he would, he did leave her side. The tank attack had sealed his future with more finality than had his inability to secure a student visa to study abroad.
As a young man fighting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Muhamed had dreamed of the mountains of Afghanistan where the mujahideen—the real soldiers of God—were trained by Osama bin Laden himself. He never got there. But seeing the American Rockies was almost as inspiring. In some ways they were even more inspiring than the Hindu Kush, because it was here that he would martyr himself for the greater glory of Allah.
It was a weekday and late, but traffic on the interstate was busy, especially the closer they got into the city, so it was midnight by the time they pulled into the large, modern Greyhound Bus depot on Nineteenth Street within blocks of the state capitol building.
Denver was different than Oklahoma City; the streets were narrower here, the air cooler and drier and the ever-present Front Range loomed like a wall on the horizon.
Muhamed carried only a small packsack with a change of socks and underwear, a clean shirt, and his toothbrush and tooth powder, plus the manila envelope with his papers and money. When he got off the bus, he did exactly as he had been instructed. He walked directly through the brightly lit terminal and out onto the street, where he turned left. One block later a dark blue Toyota SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb and the back door opened.
It was as if he were drifting through a dreamscape, not the nightmare of his uncle, but rather a waking dream in which the entire world seemed to be in soft focus. All the colors were pastels; all the sounds, even the bass thump of a stereo system in a passing car, were like sweet music;
the air was perfume, the breeze a zephyr, the clouds streaming off the mountaintops like the flowing hair of angels.
Muhamed was a happy boy. He was a soldier of God, one among the truly blessed, and soon his would be the kingdom of Paradise. His father would be proud of him, and his mother would weep tears of joy for his passing.
He climbed in the backseat of the Toyota, and the man in the front passenger seat reached back, closed the door, and stared at him as if he was seeing a god. The driver immediately took off, but his eyes kept darting to Muhamed’s image in the rearview mirror, with the same look of respect as the man in the passenger seat.
When Muhamed didn’t speak, the passenger cleared his throat. “Welcome to America. We are proud to be of assistance.”
He spoke Egyptian Arabic, the most common dialect, and one understood by just about any Arabic speaker. It was flowery by Western standards, but there was a comfort in the rhythms of the ancient language.
“Thank you. How far must thou drive to reach Fort Collins?”
“About one hour,” the passenger said. He and the driver were members of the London-based Advice and Reformation Committee that had been created by Osama bin Laden to supposedly further al-Quaida’s goal of protecting the holy shrines at Mecca and Medina. The real reason for its existence was to raise money for al-Quaida operations worldwide.
These two men were the fund-raisers and bureaucrats of the organization, not the genuine article like Muhamed, who had actually done battle against the Zionists on the streets of Nablus and in Hell’s Bootcamp. And certainly they were not of the material that martyrs were made of.
Muhamed was boss as long as he was here. No matter want he wanted, his word was law. Their instructions were to obey his every command without a single question, without hesitation, no matter how young he was.
“We have a trailer in the hills above the town, near a place called the Horsetooth Reservoir—”
“I would first like to see the target, and then my equipment. Has it arrived?”
The passenger, Seyoum Noufal, like the driver, Mustafa Maghawri, was a man in his late thirties. He’d led a reasonably comfortable life in Cairo
as a small-time electrical contractor until he began to feel guilty about the great
jihad
that was passing him by. Allah’s righteous work was being done in America. Besides, Seyoum’s wife was a shrew, his business was failing, and his twenty-year-old Chevrolet Citation was disintegrating.
The past three years in the United States, even during the post-9/11 paranoia, had been comfortable. Until now. What the young martyr was suggesting was dangerous. Police were profiling suspects even though they denied doing so. Three Arab males driving around Fort Collins, Colorado, in the middle of the night would generate some interest. If they were stopped, they would be hard-pressed to explain what they were doing.
But the young man’s orders were to be obeyed.
Seyoum nodded for Mustafa to do as they were told, and they headed for 1-25 North, the sky clearing of smog as they got out of Denver, horizon to horizon filled with stars that had been named millennia ago by Arab astronomers.
Muhamed tightly gripped his pack as the lights of the big city fell behind, and traffic on the highway thinned out. There was a darkness here that was frightening, and yet he knew that
the light
was waiting for him.
No more suffering. No more struggle or uncertainty. And best of all, his family would be taken care of.
He smiled, his young face that of an angel at peace, and he did not notice Seyoum watching from the front seat, his expression a mixture of fear and awe.
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Storis eased alongside the Harris Harbor cruise-ship docks in downtown Juneau just before dark, and within minutes the 230-foot warship was secured by a young, highly charged crew. They had rescued 122 people from four overloaded lifeboats that were in immediate danger of swamping in the high winds and large seas.
They had also retrieved the bodies of nineteen of the
Spirit’s
crew and passengers from the frigid waters. Black plastic bags were lined up on the aft deck.
The wind had calmed down, but the overcast had lowered and the cold rain had started again. Despite the bad weather, police had to cordon off a large area of the dock to hold back a crowd of more than a thousand people. Media trucks ringed the fringes of the crowd, and dozens of reporters and cameramen jockeyed for positions in front. More newspeople were on their way from the lower forty-eight and from nearly every news organization in the world.
Word had leaked that the director of the CIA and the former secretary of defense were both aboard. To top it all off, it was the DCI who had apparently saved not only Shaw but more than half the passengers and crew. He was with the U.S. government
and
he was a hero. It was an oxymoron, and the media were buying into it. Washington had been taking a lot of criticism internationally and at home, so a story like this was front-page news.
So far, nothing official had been told to the media about the hijacking, the shooting, and the cause of the sinking. But once the Storis had come into the range of a cell-phone system, more than a dozen passengers called friends and loved ones with the story. It was picked up by a radio
station in Juneau, which immediately broadcast a bulletin, even doing several live interviews with survivors aboard the cutter before the captain announced on the IMC that the FBI was requesting they be stopped until the passengers were debriefed.
That had been five hours earlier, and already the entire world knew that terrorists had attempted to kidnap the former American secretary of defense Donald Shaw to take him back to Pakistan where he would have been put on trial for war crimes.
Nothing so big had happened since 9/11.
Also gathered on the dock were six FBI special agents who made up the lead investigative team. A high school lunchroom had been set up as a processing and debriefing center for the Spirit’s crew and passengers. A triage system had been put in place, and first aboard would be doctors and nurses from the hospital who would evaluate the survivors and assign them to one of three groups. Those who required immediate medical attention, such as for heart conditions or injuries, would be taken directly to the hospital. Those needing only a bandage or a tranquilizer would be treated aboard the Coast Guard cutter and then transported over to the high school. The final group, those needing no medical attention, would be the first off the ship.
However, the media would be allowed only very limited access to the survivors until after they gave their statements to the FBI. The killings and the sinking of the cruise liner, as bad as those events had been, were secondary to the attempted kidnapping of Donald Shaw, who had been one of the driving forces behind the war on terrorism.
Shaw was big news, not only because the kidnapping had failed, but also because of Washington’s likely response. The war on terrorism would be stepped up a serious notch because of last night, and the entire world held its breath waiting to see what would happen next.
The FBI’s first task would be to extract as much information from the survivors as possible. Though the search, centered at the position where the Spirit had gone down, had been in full swing since dawn, no sign of the fishing boat or the terrorists had been found. The Bureau was looking for clues anywhere it could.
Katy McGarvey and Karen Shaw were below helping with the survivors,
while the former SecDef finished briefing his people in Washington via encrypted satellite coms from the cutter’s CIC.
McGarvey was on the bridge watching the activity on the dock and on the cutter’s decks. The Coast Guard medic aboard had bandaged McGarvey’s burned hand and had put a couple of stitches in his arm where he had gashed it getting an ax from the firefighting alcove aboard the
Spirit
. He had already spoken with his deputy DCI, Dick Adkins, and with his special projects director, Otto Rencke, assuring them that he and Katy were fine, and getting them up and running on what was being called “Project Alpha,” a plan to identify, find, and kill the terrorist Khalil.
The project had become personal last night. Not only had they manhandled McGarvey’s wife, but they had killed innocent passengers and crew as well. Worst of all they had cold-bloodedly tossed the young woman and her child into the water, and then had shot her to death.
He would never get that image out of his head, not if he lived a thousand years.
But Otto had also told him about Liese Fuelm’s call, which got him wondering what the hell the Swiss were doing watching the comings and goings of a Saudi prince. And why had Liese tried to reach him at home? Was it something out of his past catching up with him? Such things had happened before, with unhappy consequences. He did not want to go through that kind of pain again.
But there it was: the nagging at the back of his head, impossible to ignore.
The cutter’s skipper, Commander Tom Gallagher, was speaking via walkie-talkie to his first officer down on the main deck, when Don Shaw, who was dressed like McGarvey and the other survivors in Coast Guard utilities, walked in. The captain looked up. “Stand by,” he told his first officer. “Did my people provide what you needed, sir?” Gallagher, with his square features and ruddy outdoors complexion, looked like a high school football coach. He was a sharp officer with an ace crew.
Shaw was obviously hurting. The ship’s medic had bandaged his head wound, bound up his ribs, and given him a mild painkiller, but the former SecDef had refused anything else, preferring to keep his head on straight for the moment. A team of Navy doctors was coming up from
Seattle aboard the C-130 Hercules that would take Shaw back to Washington, and they would conduct a thorough examination of him in flight.
He nodded tiredly. “You have a good crew,” he said. “Thank them for me, would you?”
“Will do, sir,” the skipper said. He glanced down at the crowd on the docks. “What would you like to do about security, Mr. Secretary?”
“My ride is about a half-hour out, so if you can provide it, I’ll need a detail and transportation out to the airport.”
“That’ll be no problem, sir,” Gallagher promised. “But what about the media? Would you like us to do something about them?”
Shaw smiled, even though he was tired and beat up, and he patted the Coast Guard officer on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of that part, if you’ll just send someone down to tell them I’ll conduct a very brief news conference on the dock as soon as all the passengers are taken care of.”
“Yes, sir,” the captain said, and he turned back to his walkie-talkie as Shaw took McGarvey aside.
“I suggest that you hitch a ride back to Washington with me. It’ll make security easier.”
“If you don’t mind the company, Don.”
Shaw got a distant look in his eyes for just a second.Then he shook his head as if he was having trouble believing what had happened during the night even though he had been right there and had lived through it. “I think you have become a man impossible to ignore. Hell of a job, last night, Mac. You saved a lot of lives.”
McGarvey’s jaw tightened. “Not enough.”
Shaw nodded knowingly. “It’s never enough. How many lives could we have saved if we had continued into Baghdad the first time, or if we had picked up on the signals leading to 9/11. They were there.”
“The leads are there again,” McGarvey said. As badly as he felt, he wasn’t going to beat himself up this time. He had a job to do. A terrorist to catch and kill. “Kidnapping you was just a prelude to—”
“My trial and the humiliation of America.”
“Something else,” McGarvey said. He’d felt something last night, watching Khalil, listening to the man’s words, evaluating his attitude and the almost fatalistic attitudes of his men.
Katy had picked up on the man’s subtly odd behavior too.
He was restrained, as if someone or something were holding him back, deterring him from doing what he wanted to do, and that was going on a frenzy of killing.
He would rather have murdered Shaw than try to take him captive.
Khalil had been saving himself for something even bigger than the kidnapping of the former SecDef.
“What are you thinking?” Shaw asked, concerned. “Another 9/11? Something like that?”
“It won’t be the same thing,” McGarvey said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Shaw looked away momentarily, an expression of sadness mingling with pain on his face. He shook his head. “We’re in this for the long haul,” he said, and he gave McGarvey a bleak look. “Especially you. It doesn’t end here for you, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” McGarvey said.
Shaw nodded his understanding. He glanced at the crowd on the dock. The media was setting up a stand for microphones across from the cutter’s boarding ladder, where the news conference would be held. “Do you want to talk to them?”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You’ll have to sooner or later, you know. The president will probably insist on it. You’re a national hero, something we rather desperately need just now”
“I’ll deal with that issue if and when it comes up. In the meantime I have a job to do that could get impossible if I have the media on my back.”
Shaw nodded toward the crowd. “How are you going to get past them?”
McGarvey had to smile. “I am a spy, Mr. Secretary; I think I can manage something like that.”
Shaw smiled too. “I’ll bet you can.” He turned back to the captain. “Okay, let’s get this over with. I have a plane to catch.”
“Yes, sir,” Gallagher replied. He said something into his walkie-talkie, and ten seconds later a four-man security team carrying sidearms showed up to escort the SecDef down to the dock. Along with the local authorities, who would provide a police escort, the Coasties would stick with him and Mrs. Shaw until they were safely aboard their transport aircraft.
“See you at the airport,” Shaw said, and he left the bridge with his armed escort.
When the SecDef was gone, the captain gave McGarvey an expectant look. “How can I help, Mr. Director?” he asked.
“Have somebody fetch my wife up here, if you would. We’ll have to borrow jackets and hats and sidearms. She and I will be joining the secretary’s escort detail.”
The skipper suppressed a grin, but he nodded. “Will do, Mr. Director.”

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