Intercept (41 page)

The door opened. The light flooded out onto the farmyard, and was gone when the door closed again. Mack came out of the traps like a grey-hound. Luckily the right-hand door was pushed back beyond the ninety-degree line to the barn, which put the padlock slightly out of sight to the yard, but closer for Mack.

He reached the lock and softly jolted it, pulling down hard. As he feared, it was securely locked. Wielding the bolt-cutters he snapped the blades onto the padlock’s cast-steel curved bar and cleaved it in half. He twisted it off, shoved it in his pocket and replaced it with his own padlock. He snapped it shut, just as the first one had been, but Mack left the new key jutting out of the hole.

He picked up the cutters, checked the spare key was in his pocket, and bounded back into the shadows. Elapsed time: less than one minute.

He watched the guard return ten minutes later, bringing with him a tray of five cups of coffee. He walked into the barn, presumably to distribute the hot drinks, and emerged holding just one cup. Temporarily the noise from inside subsided, but it started again in five minutes—the drilling, the dull thump of the nail gun, and the running engine. Mack could only wait.

Finally, at around 12:30 on the new Wednesday morning, the motors died. The lights went out in the barn, and five guys trooped out. In the false light of the yard Mack could have sworn one of the men there was Ibrahim Sharif, the terrorist he always thought he recognized.

He’d studied the photographs long and hard, but still he could not be sure. One of the five was a very big guy, and Mac thought it could easily have been Ben al-Turabi, but again he could not be certain, because they were mostly facing away from him.

Precisely as last night, no one lingered long in the living room of the house. The television light went off, and so did all of the downstairs lights, except for the one in the kitchen. There was no longer a guard in the yard but the outside lights were all on.

Mack watched someone emerge from the front door and walk across to the barn. He pulled first one door shut, and then walked three strides back for the other. He closed them together, and without hesitation, twisted the key in Mack’s padlock. He opened the lock bar and threaded it through two of the big chain links. Then he pushed down on the bar to shut it,
twisted the key once more to double-lock, then pulled it out and dropped it in his pocket. Mack smiled the smile of the profoundly cunning.

The man walked back to the house, entered through the front door, and shut it behind him. Mack watched the outside lights go out and then he slipped from out of the shadows.

Softly he walked to the center of the wide barn doors, and opened his own padlock with the spare key. The chains fell slack, and, putting the padlock in his pocket, Mack eased open the big door and slipped through the narrow gap. He pulled the doors shut behind him, and turned his new flashlight onto the wall of straw that towered over him. Right now he could see nothing remotely industrial.

He moved to the side and shone his flashlight the length of the straw wall. Then he noticed the wide front “wall” was not joined to the side “wall.” There was a space between the big square bales that formed the entire structure. Mack could see they were all held together by lengths of dark red twine.

He edged through the space and found himself inside a large shoebox-like structure, all made of straw, with no ceiling. Mack found this incredible. But more incredible was the single content of the box: one large, full-sized yellow school bus, good for about thirty passengers. From out of its doors came a succession of cables. The entrance to the bus was wide open, and Mack stepped inside and shone his light.

The entire rear end of the transporter was stacked with wooden cases, some nailed down hard, some half open, others completely open. On the floor were a couple of drills, a nail gun, several screwdrivers, a couple of hammers, and two small hand carts. The bus felt warm as if the heating system had recently been running.

Mack walked back outside and checked the space around the “shoe box,” inside and out. On the left, the area inside the barn’s end wall, was a pile of transparent plastic sacks that contained a white powdery substance, like cement or sugar. All around were plastic cans of fuel oil, maybe even diesel. And in the air was the deeply unpleasant whiff of ammonia.

Mack would have known that smell anywhere. It was the one that lingered after a blast from an IED. It was the aftermath of an explosion from an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb. And it had also been in the caches of explosive that Foxtrot Platoon had ransacked out of the Afghan mountains last time they were on duty together.

Mack walked around to the front of the bus, and on the front destination-display above the driver’s seat was one word: CANAAN
.

“Mother of God,” breathed Mack. “They’re going to drive this fucker into the school and blow it to high heaven, right in the middle of Abraham’s Day. And they got enough explosive in there to knock down Wall Street.”

He re-boarded the bus and walked back to the rear seats. He re-examined the bags of white powder, noting that they each contained over fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. He also found sacks of nitromethane, two bags of powdered ammonia, and five tied nine-inch high bundles of dynamite, all agents to increase the intensity and speed of the explosion.

“Holy shit,” whispered Mack. “These bastards are not joking.”

He switched off his flashlight and moved to the door, easing it open and squeezing through the narrowest possible gap. There were no lights on, and he grabbed and re-locked his padlock. At which point two people each received the greatest shock of their lives—Mack Bedford and the guard he referred to as Che Guevara, who suddenly walked around the side of the barn.

The guard froze and Mack instantly shone the flashlight directly into the man’s eyes, blinding him. He temporarily grappled for his rifle, but then lost consciousness when Mack landed a thunderous right hook on the side of his chin, fracturing his jaw in two places.

Mack wheeled away to his right and ran past the corner of the barn, where he grabbed the bolt-cutters and headed out to the field like an Olympic sprinter, pounding over the frozen ground, his heart beating furiously, his ears straining for sounds of an uproar back in the farmyard.

He never broke stride. And, racing in the cold glow of a pale moon, he reached the treeline and crashed into the welcoming shadows. For a few moments he stopped and trained the binoculars on the farm. Nothing. No lights. No movement. No sound.

Swiftly he ran through the trees and across the road. There was not a car in sight, and in the dead silence of the night, the Nissan, when it started, sounded to him like the re-launch of the space shuttle.

He drove quietly into the parking lot of the hotel just before 2 a.m. Then he crept through the darkened rear section of the downstairs area and headed to his room, where he immediately picked up a message from Benny, asking him to call him when he got in, no matter the time.

Mack called Benny from his cell phone. “I didn’t know you’d be up this late,” Benny joked. “I got some news, probably not operational but extremely interesting.”

“Shoot,” said Mack.

“The man from 21D landed in Riyadh via Paris two days ago, and we tracked him to one of the royal palaces, where he met with several imams and Saudi princes. Yesterday he left on a royal flight, one of the king’s Boeing 747-300’s. It landed in Peshawar, and a government registered car took him into the city. He’s staying at the home of a very senior minister, Shakir Khan.”

“Guess that figures,” replied Mack. “They were in Madrid together, right? Just before the trains were bombed.”

“Correct. And our guys think Shakir’s the instigator of that phone intercept the Brits handed us.”

“Well, it looks like this thing’s gonna blow on Friday. I need you and Johnny to head up here today, and I have a whole list of things for you to bring.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“One hundred percent. Now grab a pen.”

Mack asked for tape, det-cord, and electronic detonators with a 300-yard range control box. He also requested a Satnav GPS system with full radar fitted into a laptop, a couple of hammers, screws, screwdrivers, metal brackets, batteries, a battery-powered drill, flashlights, electric wires and cutters, and black cammy cream, the SEAL’s special device to take the shine away from faces in the moonlight.

Finally, he asked for C-4 plastic high-explosive or Semtex, the favorite of both the Navy SEALs and the Mossad. It’s neat, clean, and easily transportable—it it’s not too heavy and it comes in small off-white blocks that are easily lashed together with duct tape. Also it blows like a sonofabitch. Terrorists used it to blast a hole in the portside hull of USS
Cole
in October 2000, and to knock down the U.S. military housing complex Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

“What the hell are you planning to blow up?” asked Benny. “A fucking mountain!”

“No, but I can’t afford a mistake. See you later, buddy.”

 

MIKE, THE HEAD
of the Boston Sleeper Cell, inactive since 2001, didn’t know what hit him. He had walked quietly out into the deserted night garden of Mountainside Farm and had somehow found himself in a war zone.

He was unconscious for forty-two minutes and woke up with a fractured jaw, lying on the freezing ground, and rapidly descending into shock and dehydration. He dragged himself to his feet and staggered into the house. Ibrahim was appalled at what he saw. His colleague’s jaw was swollen like a football on one side of his face, his head was bleeding where it had hit the ground, and he looked as if he might die here and now.

“I think someone hit me,” Mike grated through teeth clamped together to relieve the pain. “I need to get to a hospital.”

Ibrahim did not especially want to order yet another of his team to be shot dead. And he assessed that may not be necessary since Mike was walking wounded, not flat on his back unable to move. Nonetheless, he understood that Mike was no longer a part of the operation and that he could not go to a hospital around here, certainly not the one in Torrington.

He asked Mike if he could whistle up a couple of replacements in Boston. The broken terrorist was optimistic, and Ibrahim ordered one of the newer arrivals to fire up the muddy truck outside, and drive Mike to Boston, where two replacements would be ready to make the journey back.

“You mean you just drop me at home?” gritted Mike, “And let me make my own way to a hospital?”

“I have no choice. Give Ben the numbers of the new recruits and get moving. Allah will look kindly upon you for your sacrifice.”

Right now, the murderous pain in Mike’s face was all-consuming, and he wanted to tell the boss that he couldn’t give a damn about Allah’s kindly looks. He cared only for a doctor. He knew the jaw was broken, and he knew it needed resetting and probably wiring together. He also knew that whoever, or whatever, had hit him resembled nothing less than a sledgehammer.

They wrapped Mike in a blanket and helped him into the passenger seat of the jeep, and Ibrahim called a meeting to discuss the exasperating series of “accidents” that had taken place in the past few days. None of them understood what had happened because aside from this unknown assailant, no one was bothering them. The Americans seemed completely unaware of their activities. Except for this raving lunatic running around in the dark flattening people.

There was no measurable danger, no set of rules, except to stay out of the farmyard after dark. Mike had offered no more clues than the other two, apart from saying there was a bright light shining directly into his eyes before he got hit, like he’d been hit by a car or a truck, and caught in the headlights.

But there were no cars or trucks on the farm. Someone had punched Mike to the ground. Either that or hit him with a club, or a baseball bat. But who? Who the hell waits around in the dark to whack people? Thieves? Robbers? It beat the hell out of Ibrahim.

What Ibrahim did know was that half the Muslim world was awaiting news of the forthcoming attack on the Great Satan. Everything was already in place: the time, the dates, the entry, the explosive, the staff, the communications. The project was long past the point of no return. It could not fail. This was the most momentous glory to Allah since 9/11, and he was the head of it, chosen by the Great Ones to take both Islamic and personal revenge on the Satan. For him, there must be rewards of an unfathomable nature, rewards that would one day be bestowed upon him by Allah Himself.

For he would ultimately cross the bridge, and the three trumpets would sound for him as he entered Paradise. The pleasures of the virgins would await him, and surely the Prophet himself would be there to welcome him home. Ibrahim had never been a seeker of personal glory, but now he stood on the threshold of either earthly glory or undying martyrdom.

Quite frankly, he preferred earthly glory, but martyrdom in the personal service of Allah was a rarified and exalted thing, and if he should be called upon to make that final and most glorious sacrifice, then he would walk willingly forward to serve his God. Meanwhile he intended to remain light on his feet, as it were, utilizing to the fullest his extremely sophisticated command of the English language perfected in the cafés around Harvard Square.

 

MACK BEDFORD’S REQUEST
for high explosive was channeled through a convoluted chain of command. Benny Shalit passed it on to Johnny Strauss, who then passed it to his principal contact in the CIA, who alerted Captain Ramshawe, who put in the formal request to Admiral Mark Bradfield, the ex-Carrier Battle Group Commander, who now occupied the Chief of Naval Operation’s chair in the Pentagon.

The CNO instantly flashed an encrypted signal to Rear-Admiral Andy Carlow, Commander, SPECWARCOM, Coronado. He had it relayed on to the SEAL base at Virginia Beach, which sits on the Atlantic, east of the gigantic Norfolk Naval Base, with its four miles of waterfront on the Hampton Roads Peninsula.