Intercept (24 page)

Once more he walked back across the ground, pacing out distances, listening, searching for the one spot in which he could hide, and watch for the arrival of his targets, or, alternatively, his enemy. It was almost eight o’clock when he finally made his decision.

He did not want to be too high, but certainly not at ground level. His SEAL telescope gave him fabulous vision no matter how dark. But he needed elevation; just sufficient to allow him to leap to the ground, and to provide an all-around view of the dark, wet moorland.

On one side of the biggest rock, there was a “shoulder” jutting out, probably fifty feet up. But below that, there were cuts and hollows and breaks in the stone. Mack could see a crevasse, almost like a crow’s nest in a ship. It was maybe fifteen feet above ground level. But there was a rocky platform maybe six feet wide about halfway up to it. If he had to, Mack could hit the ground in two bounds from there, one onto the platform, one onto the grass.

Mack climbed the rock, and hunkered down, right in the lee of the wind. He aimed his glass down at the road and scanned the area. There was not a movement anywhere, just the rain sweeping across Ilkley Moor on a stiff, rising northwester.

 

SHEIKH ABDULLAH’S
three cutthroats left the mosque armed to the teeth. They slipped out of a side window and crept down a long wall to a narrow side street, where a black car and a Bangladeshi driver awaited them. Out of view of the police, they piled through a rear door, and set off for the moor.

Theirs was a difficult task. They had no idea who they were looking for, no idea where he would be, and no idea how they would nail him. Also they had no idea how dangerous he might be; though Sheikh Abdullah had warned that if the assassin worked for the U.S. Government, he was likely to be lethal.

They had one advantage, the element of surprise. The assassin would not be expecting them. Aside from that, all three of them—Mustapha, Jamal, and Sachin—were scared stiff, even though the latter two were carrying fully loaded Kalashnikovs, inaccurate, but fast, powerful, high-speed weapons.

Also, they understood that if they were caught, the Brits would throw the book at them, probably demanding they face re-trial for their role in the seven-jetliner plot in 2006. In the end they all knew the consequences of apprehension by the British authorities. Only their terror of the Sheikh, and their lifelong belief that Allah loved his martyrs, and that they would be welcomed into paradise should they die on this mission, had kept them going.

They had been provided with top-class weaponry, including combat knives and service revolvers, recently stolen by an associate from a nearby police department. But they lacked night-sight and training—and they were going up against a master.

Mustapha, their leader, had a very pessimistic feeling, but they only had to kill one guy, after all. And they were sufficiently armed to take on a small platoon.

Back in police HQ, Len Martin had no knowledge of the leak from his office, no clue that his station harbored a mole, and thus considered that VBB, whoever and wherever he was, would just give up and return to his hotel when no one showed up for the assassinations on the moor. No harm done.

Twenty minutes after Mack took up position in the crevasse, Mustapha’s driver arrived. Mack had seen several cars drive by, but this was the first one that had stopped. One by one, he watched the al-Qaeda men disembark, counting them, uncertain whether the driver was one of the four he was expecting.

But then the driver stepped back into his vehicle and left, driving a short distance further on, turning around and heading right back toward the city. Mack froze. That left only three, and that was all wrong. He wanted Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu. SEALs
hate
variation in commands, loathe inaccuracy, detest even the slightest deviation to a plan.

Mack’s hair-trigger brain told him these were different guys. And why had they not arrived in a police cruiser as arranged? There should have been blue lights flashing, the final signal that these were his “targets.” Mack did not like what he was seeing, and he sensed screw-up.

The three men were walking toward him, but then they fanned out, one running to the smaller rock, one heading around to the north side of the large one, and the other positioning himself against the wall of his crevasse, fifteen feet below. He could see two of the men carried light machine guns, but not the guy right below him. And he could see them taking up obvious battle stations, rifles raised to waist level, peering into the darkness.

Mack didn’t know for sure who they were awaiting, but he had an uncanny feeling it was probably him. He surmised that there had been a leak somewhere. That the police had been unable to deliver the Chosen Ones. Even through his glass, he could see plainly that these were not the right guys.

It occurred to Mack that they had come to kill him, and that meant he might have to kill them instead. Or at least take them out of the game. Then one of them spoke, in a half-whisper, across the sloping, wet ground. The words were muffled by the rain, but they were still intelligible: “What this terrible bastard look like?”

The language was unmistakable to Mack’s trained ear. It was Pashto, the official language of Afghanistan, the language of the mountain men. “Fuck,” said Mack under his breath. “Those goddamned little creeps, all over again.”

He knew he could not stage a gun battle up here. Sounds, especially gunfire, carry in wide open places like this, rain or no rain. If they really were after him, he must take them out silently. He waited for a reply to the first question.

“No information,” someone called, “except he might be American, and that means very big and very horrible.”

“Well, where is he, Jamal?” asked the third man, in English.

“Not here yet,” came the reply. “English police say he meets our brothers at 9:30. It’s not even 8:30.”

So there had been a leak. The Chosen Ones weren’t coming. And this crowd was up here specifically to get him.

“Better get the ole’ ass in gear,” muttered Mack to himself. “Starting with this little sonofabitch right below me.” Through the glass, he could see the long, curved tribal knife, in the man’s right hand. Quietly and carefully he climbed to the rocky platform. Then he debated whether to jump and attack, or to climb slowly down and kill in total silence.

Mack chose the second option because he did not want one sound from his first victim. The man below Jamal had his dagger drawn. Mack
could see the glint even in the rain. He slowly inched down the rock until his left foot felt the wet ground at the base of the Cow.

Now he was four feet from Jamal, who was busy trying to light a cigarette. As his match flared he caught sight of the masked giant just as Mack rammed his left fist across his mouth like a manhole cover. He tried to yell, tried to bite the hand that gagged him, all in the hundredth of a second before Mack slit his throat from end to end, and the tribal knife slipped onto the soft ground beneath the giant rock.

Mack lowered the body softly, and then straightened up to spot his next target. Through the glass, he could see Mustapha leaning against the smaller rock, trying to make himself an impossible target. He heard the man call out, “Jamal! Jamal! Can you hear me?”

Mack needed to get behind him, fast, and that required a run across the open ground, thirty-eight yards and into the heather, the bit he had slightly dreaded. He tried to mimic the man he had just killed, “Jamal, Jamal here!”

He took off into the darkness. He tried to keep quiet but the pounding of his boots betrayed him. But it also confused his two enemies.

Mustapha now yelled out, “Jamal, where you going, man? You can’t run out on us now.”

By this time Mack Bedford had dived headlong into the high heather, and was lying completely still as he made an infinitesimal adjustment on his glass, just so he could see Mustapha with total clarity in the soft green glow of all night-vision equipment.

The silence of Jamal completely unnerved his leader, who opened fire in blind panic—just one burst aimed toward the biggest rock. The third man standing in total shadow on the far side of The Cow suddenly yelled, “What’s going on? Mustapha, where’s Jamal? Is anyone here?”

That yell betrayed him. Mack swiveled the glass and focused on Sachin. He drew his pistol and shot him dead at forty yards range, four SIG-Sauer 9mm bullets fired right into his upper chest.

Mustapha still had no idea who was doing the shooting. He screamed out, almost hysterically, and all the while Mack Bedford was coming through the heather, in the grim terrifying elbow crawl of the trained Navy SEAL sniper.

“Where are you? JAMAL! SACHIN! ANSWER ME!”

Mustapha had no clue who was alive or dead, or if there was an intruder. Were they still alone? Why was Jamal no longer answering? Again, in a kind of fiendish desperation, he opened fire into the darkness,
three volleys, echoing over the moors. But now there was only silence. Mustapha was petrified.

And he did not have long to wait. He slumped back against the rock, his rifle held loosely by his side. At which precise moment Mack Bedford came out of the night.

Mack grabbed the barrel of the rifle from Mustapha’s astonished grip, leaned back like a baseball slugger, and swung the butt with home-run force straight into the Afghani’s face, obliterating the nose, both cheek-bones, the jawbone, and the front area of his skull. Mustapha, his head caved in, died as he slithered backward down the Calf. Mack’s unscheduled night’s work was almost done.

He dragged Mustapha’s body over to the big rock, retrieved Jamal’s dagger, and placed it in the leader’s right hand. Then he jogged over to Sachin, dragged him over to the other two, and placed that rifle firmly into Mustapha’s grasp. Now they were just three immigrants from a primitive tribal culture, who’d had a somewhat nasty row.

He picked up Mustapha’s rifle and hurled it with all of his force, far into the heather. Then he began his mile-long walk across the moor, in the rain, back to the hotel, where he would change, shower, and get into dry clothes.

He would check in with Russ Makin and leave cash in an envelope in the room to pay the bill. He would then head south, back to the iron-security of the SAS base, where he could regroup in peace and quiet. Mack presumed Russ would have the SAS clean up those bodies long before anyone else realized they were even dead.

And only a few locals had heard the steady beat of the helicopter’s rotors when four SAS men landed on the moor two hours later and efficiently removed the three dead Afghanis.

 

SHEIKH ABDULLAH
was still walking around free, thanks mainly to an instinct for survival that, in modern times, ranked second only to that of the impeached U.S. President Bill Clinton. And right now he had but one thing on his mind. He had to get Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu the hell out of the UK before they all ended up in the slammer, himself included.

Dr. Kamil had driven them back to Darsfield Street and had agreed to remain with them, for his usual astronomical fee. But the Sheikh was unnerved by the entire set of circumstances. He already sensed there was big trouble out on Ilkley Moor, and that the Americans were in league with the British government in their determination to eliminate the
Chosen Ones, the Holy Warriors of Allah. He had to get them away, in the obvious interests of both Allah and The Prophet. But even more significantly in the interests of the blood brothers of al-Qaeda, the disciples of bin Laden.

He guessed it would be a matter of hours before the West Yorkshire Police came up with another reason to arrest Ibrahim and his men. And he decided to move immediately. He picked up the phone and instructed Dr. Kamil to drive them out to Leeds-Bradford airport, where the chartered aircraft from Air Iran was waiting.

The Sheikh, dressed now in Western clothes, would meet them there and supervise their exit from Great Britain. “Tell them to bring passports, visas, and all other documents,” he said. “They cannot stay here.”

Before he left he called his main contact at Air Iran in Tehran, and deposited the problem with him—the problem being, of course, what to do with the Chosen Ones and how to find a place for them to land in another country, any country, except the UK.

When he arrived at the airport he was met by an Air Iran official who informed him they could take off immediately. The four passengers were on board, and Dr. Kamil had left for Manchester.

The sixteen-seater turbo-jet was fueled and ready, and the Ayatollah in Tehran, with whom the official had consulted, had arranged for the flight to go into Alcolea, a rural Spanish airstrip outside the picturesque Andalusian city of Cordoba. There they would be transported to a Muslim safehouse in the city at first light.

This pleased the Bradford imam immensely. Spain was becoming increasingly important to Europe’s network of Islamic extremists, and nowhere was more important than Cordoba, with its Great Mosque, which had been turned into a Cathedral in 1492, when five hundred years of Muslim rule in Spain had ended. But it was still one of the largest mosques in the world, with nineteen aisles, eight hundred and fifty red-and-white striped Moorish arches, and epic Muslim simplicity.

For centuries it had been neither one nor the other. And periodic uproars were apt to break out over the ban on mass Muslim prayer meetings. The massive mosque/cathedral had two warring hearts, with Spain’s one million Muslims seized by romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of al-Andaluca, and the Caliphate that had ruled the country for so long.

It was the perfect situation to breed resentment, indignation, anger, and that brand of religious loathing that sits so easily upon the shoulders of the Islamic faithful. There are hundreds of mosques in Spain, and many of
the population, not to mention the Catholic bishops, believe they are funded by undemocratic countries promoting radical Islam, particularly Saudi Arabia.