Soldier of God (47 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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The morning was chilly, with thick dew on the grass as Muhamed Abdallah got out of the dark blue Toyota SUV two blocks from Rocky Mountain High School. Workday traffic was normal for this hour. No one was armed, none of the storefronts in the city were boarded up, there were no bars on windows, nor were there police or soldiers stationed at the intersections.
The laxity was nothing sort of amazing to him. But after today no one would ever ignore the
fatwahs
of Osama bin Laden again.
Ever since he’d gotten word, a gentle peace had come over him, descending like the veils of Muhammad’s wives. It was a blasphemous thought, one that he did not share with his hosts Seyoum and Mustafa, but it was comforting.
Paradise will soon be mine. Even now my black-eyed wife awaits me.
“Are you okay?” Seyoum asked, respectfully, through the open passenger window.
Muhamed opened his eyes to him and to Mustafa sitting behind the wheel, and his heart suddenly filled with love for them.
Rejoice, 0 my brothers, for I go first to heaven to prepare the way.
He nodded, but he could not trust himself to speak. All his spit had dried up.
“Then you know the way? It is only two blocks—”
Muhamed turned and walked off. He would never see his two brothers on earth again, but that did not matter. He smiled. He was finally on his
jihad
, and no power on earth could stay his hand.
Insha’allah.
I profess that there is no God but the One God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Rising before dawn this morning, Muhamed had bathed and had taken great care with his shaving. Like many young Muslim men, he preferred to maintain a four- or five-day growth; it was a matter of style. But not here. High school students in the U.S. were generally clean-shaven.
He began taping the twenty kilos of plastic explosives to his naked body at 5 A.M., molding the puttylike material first to his legs, then around his abdomen and his chest, even his back, though that had been extremely awkward to do. Finally he’d taped long slender strips of the Semtex to his arms from a few centimeters above his wrists to his shoulders.
He left his feet, his knees, and his elbows free so he would be able to walk and gesture normally, but Semtex was taped to every other square centimeter of his body that would be covered by his jeans and LA Lakers sweatshirt.
In the mirror he looked like some otherworldly monster whose hide seemed to be made of large gray scales.
Finished by 7 A.M., he took great care to connect the electrical wires that would send a current to the firing pins in each block of Semtex. When he got dressed, the wires would lead from a hole in his jeans pocket to the detonator that had been fashioned from a cell phone.
At the right moment, after he was inside the school, perhaps in the cafeteria or in the central corridor between class periods, he would reach in his pocket and press any key.
He would wait then, long enough for a brief prayer, and then press any second key, which would send the current.
“You will feel no pain,” his recruiter in Nablus had promised him, although no suicide bomber had ever returned to give witness to the claim. “One moment you will be of this earth, and in the next you will be in Paradise.”
“Insha’allah,”
Muhamed whispered, lost in his thoughts as he turned the corner onto Rocky Mountain Avenue, one block from the school.
The morning was suddenly deathly still. Where before the traffic flowed along Swallow, nothing moved here.
Muhamed pulled up short, realizing that something was wrong. He looked around. There was no traffic. No trucks or cars on the street. Not one person on the sidewalks. No kids in front of the school. No school buses.
He was alone, and suddenly conscious of how difficult it was to walk with twenty kilos of Semtex strapped to his body.
Even the McDonald’s across the street seemed to be deserted. At this time of day the drive-in lane should have been filled.
It came to him all at once that he had failed.
A pair of police cars appeared at the end of the street and stopped in the middle of the intersection. Their lights were flashing but there were no sirens.
Muhamed stepped back and turned around. Police cars, lights flashing, were blocking the way he had come.
The Qur’an says that for every people there is a messenger.
Muhamed knew the words well. His messenger had come for him, but the issue between them could not be justly determined now. Somehow the authorities had found out he was coming here.
He put his hand in his right pocket and pressed a key on the cell phone, and then held his breath, waiting for bullets to slam into his body.
No shots were fired.
He turned back in time to see at least a dozen sharpshooters suddenly appear on the high school’s roof. They were dressed in the same kind of camos that the Israeli soldiers wore when they came into the camps on hit-and-run operations.
It came to him that they had also failed, and he breathed a little easier. If their mission was to stop him from detonating his bomb, they were too late. His finger was on the key. Even if they shot him, he would press it as his life left his body.
None of the infidels would be hurt. But Osama’s message that America still was not safe, that al-Quaida and its brave mujahideen and brave Muslims everywhere were willing to give their lives for the cause of justice, would be made perfectly clear.
A heavily armored bomb-disposal truck lumbered from behind the school and headed across the parking lot toward him, stopping about fifty meters away.
Muhamed was no longer frightened. Even without success he knew that his path to Paradise was assured, for wasn’t he promised that every son or daughter of the one true faith who lost their lives in the
jihad
were of the pure of spirit?
“Lay face down on the street,” an amplified voice boomed from a speaker on the bomb disposal unit.
Muhamed took a step forward, surprised at how steady his legs had become.
“Thou must lie face down on the street.
” The order came again, but this time it was in Arabic.
Muhamed took another step forward.
One of the sharpshooters on the roof rose up.
Muhamed closed his eyes. He could see his mother’s precious, loving face. Scolding him sometimes, but always with love.
“Allah O Akbar,”
he whispered,
God is great
, and he pressed the key.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon of the next day when the Swiss ambassador, Helmuth Schmidt, left Dennis Berndt’s office in the West Wing. Their meeting had been as short as it had been surprising to the president’s national security adviser.
But then, he thought as he gathered his files and headed down the corridor to the Oval Office, this had been nothing short of a stunning few days. We’d dodged another bullet, largely because of Kirk McGarvey’s actions. At the very least, Haynes was going to win the next election by a landslide, and Americans had gained a new confidence in their government that had been badly shaken by 9/11.
The fact was that although the terrorist Khalil and Prince Salman were not the same man, they in effect had been partners. Khalil set up the attacks, and Salman funneled him the money through a bank in Trinidad. Schmidt had been very precise about his facts. His government had been investigating the prince for nearly two years, and among other items of interest they had uncovered was that most, but not all, of Khalil’s money had come from the prince. Several hundred thousand euros and other hard currencies had been transferred to Kahlil’s account by Salman’s wife, Princess Sofia.
In many respects she was even more devious than her husband. As far as the Swiss could figure, not one person in the Saudi government knew about her involvement, though there were some at the highest levels who knew about her husband’s financial dealings with al-Quaida.
Schmidt described her as a loose cannon, who not only knew of her husband’s involvement with bin Laden, but who also encouraged him to travel at certain odd times. On this point the Swiss federal authorities were a little less clear; they had not come up with any solid evidence. But
it was believed there was a strong likelihood that Khalil had even given her instructions to help coordinate his moves with Prince Salman’s.
It would make her an accessory to acts of terrorism and murder.
“We can’t prove it, yet,” Schmidt admitted, “but our evidence is strong enough to deport her.” The ambassador was an older man, with thick white hair and impeccable Swiss formality. “We thought that your government should be made aware of our investigation in light of the recent events at the Salman compound outside Lucerne.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador,” Berndt had said. “But what about Khalil? Do you know who he is? His DNA and fingerprints are not on any of our databases, nor has Interpol been able to help.”
Schmidt shook his head. “For a time it was thought that he was a resident of Trinidad and Tobago. This morning I was sent word that our inquiries there have so far turned up nothing.”
“He was an elusive man,” Berndt observed.
“Yes,” the ambassador said, rising. He took an accordion file folder secured with a string out of his attaché case and handed it across. “This is a precis of our investigation. Perhaps it will aid you in your hunt for bin Laden.” He shook his head. “This ugly business must be stopped.”
Indeed, Berndt thought, as the uniformed guards outside the Oval Office nodded to him. It would never be over until bin Laden was caught or killed. And even then, he had to wonder if there would be peace, or if some new Islamic fanatic with the same intelligence, charisma, and power would rise up. The war between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism had been going on for a very long time.
The Oval Office was abuzz with staffers coming and going, some of them on telephones or laptop computers, getting ready for the president’s talk to the nation this evening.
Haynes was sitting at his desk talking to someone on the phone and looking out the windows toward the Rose Garden. Secretary of State Eugene Carpenter sat next to the president, a handset to his ear.
Beckett spotted Berndt at the doorway and went over. He was animated. “How’d your meeting with Schmidt go?” he asked. “Did you manage to pour oil on troubled waters?”
Berndt smiled faintly. “I’m a persuasive man.” He nodded toward the president. “Who’s he talking to?”
“Prince Abdullah, the last big hurdle,” Beckett said. “Called to congratulate us on our victory.”
“Big of him, since Saudi money financed the operation,” Berndt said sharply. We had beat the bastards this time, but there would be others. He was getting too old for this. Once the dust settled, he was going to resign and return to academia. It was a decision he’d made some days ago, but now in light of the compromises that everyone was rushing to make, he found that he was sick of the business, and he didn’t know if he could or even should wait that long.
Beckett’s expression darkened. “We’ve already gone over that, Dennis. We don’t have the proof—”
“We do now,” Berndt said, holding up the Swiss file. “Salman
and
his wife have been pumping royal family money to Khalil for years. Couldn’t have been done without Prince Abdullah’s knowledge and at least his tacit approval.”
“You got that from Schmidt?”
“Yeah,” Berndt said, tiredly. “But they won’t do a thing except to deport Salman’s wife and children. The Saudi money is too important to them to upset the applecart by making what Schmidt called ‘wild accusations.’”
“It’s the same thing a spokesman for the Rainier family told us,” Beckett said. “And the French. It’s the real world.”
“Yes, it is.”
Beckett smiled. “The good news is that no one got hurt, except for the kid in Colorado who blew himself up. But it was close.”
Berndt really looked at Beckett, and then at the others doing their thing around the president of the United States. They were happy and excited, of course. They
had
dodged a bullet that would have been even larger than 9/11. But the president’s staffers were behaving as if it were they who had stopped the suicide bombers. They lived in an isolated environment here. No matter how often they traveled with or for the president around the country or around the world, they were still tethered to this one place.
“Dennis?” Beckett prompted.
“It wouldn’t have been so close if we’d listened to McGarvey in the first place.”
Beckett nodded. “And the president is willing to forgive his insubordination. There’ll be a Senate investigation, of course, but the president will stand behind him.” Beckett lowered his voice. “Maybe even give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It would put a nice cap on Mac’s career.”
“Yes, it would,” President Haynes said, finished with his phone call. He got to his feet, a warm smile on his face. “And the Saudis have agreed to cooperate with us. We’ll drop the issue of Prince Salman’s money, and in turn there’ll be no formal protests over the damage we caused at their embassy and think tank.”
Berndt was struck dumb.
“How are our Mr. McGarvey and his wife?” the president asked.
“Recovering,” Berndt said. “But what are we supposed to say to the families of the two firemen whom a Saudi citizen murdered?”
“We don’t know that he was a Saudi,” Haynes replied, mildly. “But be that as it may, those two men are heroes. They blocked Khalil’s escape long enough for McGarvey to reach him. Their families can be proud that they didn’t die in vain. And I’ll tell that to the nation this evening.”
“Yes, they were heroes,” Berndt mumbled. Beckett’s assessment of the real world politik was on the mark. This was political expediency in just about its most aggressive form. Oil for dollars. It had been all about that, even before World War II. It’s why the politicians had divided the Middle East not along ethnic or religious lines, but along oil deposits.
Haynes was watching him. “Are you okay, Dennis?”
Berndt realized that he’d been wool gathering, something he’d been doing a lot of lately. And his disappointment probably showed on his face. He nodded. “Just tired, Mr. President. It’s been a hectic few days.”
“That it has,” Haynes said. “I’m going to need you until we go on the air tonight, and then I think that you and Joyce should get away for a few days or a week. Linda and I are taking Deb out to Keystone. Maybe I’ll catch a few trout.”
“It’s not over yet,” Berndt said. “They’ll try again.” If he resigned he would be deserting his president at a very difficult time. He didn’t know if he could do that. He was torn with indecision, something that had never seemed to bother McGarvey.
“They most certainly will,” Haynes said, “which is why I’m going to
form a task force to deal specifically with finding and capturing or killing al-Quaida’s top leadership anywhere in the world they choose to hide. Just like we did in Iraq. And when McGarvey recovers, I’m going to ask him to head it.”
“I don’t know if he’ll take the job—”
The famous Haynes campaign smile lit his face. “I think I’ll be able to convince him, especially if we can hand him bin Laden’s head on a platter.”
Berndt felt a little thrill in his stomach. “Do we have a new lead?”
“Weissman’s people did a quick sweep of the Saudi think tank in Georgetown before they had to let the Saudis back in. They found some credible documents pointing to a very specific area on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.”
“We’ve suspected all along that he’s been hiding out up there,” Berndt said, “but it’s a tough place to operate in without Pakistani support.”
“Well, we’ve got it now,” Beckett said. “Musharraf has agreed to let us in on an all-out manhunt.”
“Which is getting under way within the next twenty-four hours,” the president said. “This time we’ll get the bastard.”
Berndt nodded uncertainly. He didn’t share the president’s optimism, and even if we did capture or kill the man, the terrorism probably wouldn’t stop. “All we can do is try, Mr. President,” he said. That’s all any of them could do.

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