Intercept (46 page)

Mack was not pleased. And Johnny Strauss, the King Terrorist Hunter, felt obliged to remind him, “In my game, you just gotta tell it like it is.”

“Bullshit,” replied Mack ungraciously. “When you’re talking to me, tell it like I want to hear it!”

And they both laughed, despite everything.

MEANWHILE
, Benny had the radar positioned on a low tree branch, hooked up to a power-pack, and sweeping the grounds of Canaan Academy like a beached Navy destroyer. Traffic had virtually ceased since the first concert was about to begin, and the school orchestra was tuning up.

There was no else on the road, which meant there were no “paints” whatsoever on the screen, just that familiar “ping” as the arm swept around. Mack and Benny were laying low, literally hunkered down against the tree, waiting for the action to begin.

Across the field, Mack could see the three yellow school buses he’d spotted on his visit with the headmaster. As he stared at them through his binoculars, he wondered if they had been out this morning.

Benny was holding onto the remote control as if it contained his own heart. Like Johnny, he wanted Ben al-Turabi and Abu Hassan Akbar a lot more than he wanted the other two ex-prisoners. And he knew his prime targets, the scum who had massacred Israeli women and children, were on that school bus. Which, in his opinion, could not survive the next ten minutes.

 

ABU CHANGED GEAR
and aimed the bus over the Blackberry River. Four minutes later he came roaring past the hotel, headed for the front gates of the academy, where Officer Tony Marinello was still on duty.

Inside the bus, everyone except Abu was crouched down on the floor as low as possible, under the seats if necessary. Anywhere to stay out of the sight of any guards or police officers who might be at the gates to the school.

Abu Hassan was giving a running commentary of their position. “Okay, we are about one mile from the main gates now. There is hardly any traffic, but I’m going to slow down at the school road signs and make our approach at twenty miles an hour.”

Moments went by before Abu spoke again: “I can see a police cruiser ahead at the gates. But I don’t see a policeman. I intend to drive straight in, so you’ll feel a lurch as we swing right when we get there. If the officer signals me to stop, I will pretend not to see him, and carry on, straight up the drive.

“Like Ibrahim says, this bus has a Canaan sign above my seat, and it looks very official. I’m trying to look as if I’m just going home. And you will be the same, just regular delivery men going about your ordinary work.”

 

NOW SITTING
in his cruiser just outside the entrance of the school, Tony Marinello could see a fourth school bus of the day driving toward him
along Route 44. He didn’t pay it much mind, though, until he noticed its turn signal flashing. Seconds before the bus made a right turn onto the school grounds, the driver raised his right hand in a brief wave of recognition. Tony nodded and raised his left, returning the gesture.

But something wasn’t quite right here. He reached up to his checklist that he’d jammed into the visor above the steering wheel. Three buses, not four.

Tony thought maybe there was a screw-up—that Ms. Calvert had written three but meant four. He decided to call it in.

Captain “Buzzy” Hannon came on the line. “Hi, Tony. What’s up?”

“Sir, I got a slight discrepancy here. I’m at the gates of the academy, and my list shows three school buses scheduled to enter the premises. A fourth just drove in, and I just want to check that’s a list inaccuracy.”

“Hang on. Let me check mine,” he said, and there was a short pause. Then he spoke again. “Looks like I’m also showing only three school buses. Why don’t you go check it out. Take a drive up to the school office.”

“What if I find something? What if it’s an illegal bus? Can I demand to search it?”

“It won’t be, kid. But, if it is, and you have suspicions, call in for back-up. I just don’t want any heroics in the environment of a school, hear me?”

“Don’t worry, sir. I won’t frighten the kids.”

Officer Marinello slipped off the handbrake and headed through the gates of and up the long drive to the main buildings.

 

THERE WAS A
five-miles-an-hour speed limit on the school drive and Abu Hassan did not plan to break it, nor commit any other faux pas, which might draw attention to his bus. Nor did he think much of the police car about a hundred yards behind him.

This was the first time the hit men had been alone. Ibrahim and Yousaf had swung the old Dodge truck off to the right. They planned to take the scenic route and enter through the east gate, rendezvousing with the bus somewhere along the north wall of the main building later.

Abu Hassan Akbar checked his watch and tried to gauge time and distance to the target parking spot. He was on the straight part of the drive now and he guessed it was around six hundred yards to the main door. He called out a new bulletin to the nine men cramped down on the floor.

“We’re about four minutes out,” the veteran Palestinian merchant of death estimated. “Start preparing to get out. Fred and Charlie first. Joe and Skip next. Handcarts in the trunk.”

And then he took a piece of paper from his pocket and began to read the words Ibrahim had said
must
be the last words they heard before going into action: “This is from our leader,” he told them, keeping one eye on the road ahead as he read. “We are only moments from staging the World Trade Center all over again,” he began. “That was the greatest of all missions, and it is the one we have waited so many years to repeat. Because that was the mission that terrified the Great Satan.

“And now the fate of Islam lies in your hands, and I know you will not let anyone down. You have the courage. You have the skills. And you fight under the banner of Allah. You will leave no survivors. Let the will of Allah be done.”

The bus continued its stately progress along the drive, tracked by Officer Marinello, and now watched by Mack Bedford and Benny Shalit from the other side of the north playing fields.

Meanwhile the Dodge truck was hurtling along the country lanes that led to the east gate. Yousaf was in command of their remote-control detonator, which would ultimately blow the bomb boxes. He asked Ibrahim to slow down a little while he made one final adjustment to the electronics.

Abu Hassan still thought nothing of the police cruiser that seemed to be following him, and he stared ahead at the clock tower high above the school. It was one minute before 10:30 a.m. Inside the packed assembly hall, the orchestra and the massed singers of three choirs prepared to launch the proceedings.

The hall held thirteen hundred spectators, in addition to the forty-five musicians, now quiet in the orchestra pit, and the one hundred fifty singers, now assembled on the stage.

Mark Jenson, resplendent in his Harvard gown and wide blue academic sash, called the auditorium to silence and welcomed everyone to Abraham’s Day, for the one moment in the year when everyone reflected on the founder of the Israeli nation.

Canaan Academy, he reminded the audience, was “twinned” with the Hebrew School in the small town of Kiryat Arba, the biblical name for Hebron, which stands below the hill on which the Jewish settlement is built. “And today,” he said, “I would like us to reflect for one silent minute, on the Tomb of the Patriarch, the wondrous building that dominates Hebron, and the last resting place of Abraham in the land where he forged his Covenant with God.”

A giant photograph of the tomb was then illuminated behind the choirs, and two long notes were blown on the Ram’s Horn, the traditional musical instrument of Judaism, the only musical instrument in the world that has not changed in five thousand years.

The auditorium fell silent as the audience reflected on their own roots and the beginnings of their nation. Those who had been to Hebron closed their eyes in prayer, and saw in their mind’s eye the massive structure of the tomb, where the remains of Abraham and his wife Sarah, lie alongside those of his sons and their wives, Jacob and Leah, Isaac, and Rebecca.

When the minute’s silence was concluded, Mark Jenson stood up and spoke to the audience once more. “With our thoughts now in the Holy Land, we should offer personal prayers for peace to return to our distant land, and pray that it will continue to be, for us, the land of milk and honey promised to Moses by God.”

The Ram’s Horn sounded twice more, and the school orchestra struck up the overture to the hymn, which begins with the most sacred word in Judaism:

The words, sung with aching beauty, by the high trebles, in harmony with the newly formed tenors and baritones of the senior class, rose in an uplifting swell that drifted out from the high windows and across the lawns and woodlands of Connecticut.

Mack Bedford and Benny Shalit heard it clearly as they watched the bus moving slowly up the drive, and the man from the Mossad was visibly moved. He stood up, as if for a national anthem, and he held his detonator out in front of him, watching the indicator light flickering on and off, he hoped, synchronized with its twin under the fuselage of the bus.

Right now they knew only one thing. The tracker device was definitely still working. They stood quietly watching the bus draw nearer, as the voices of the Canaan Academy choirs wafted out over the golden oak trees that lined the drive.

Mack Bedford had his mark mentally on the drive. Two giant oak trees planted quite closely were his halfway point, when he assessed the bus would come within range. The next hundred yards would be the last it ever traveled.

Staring through his binoculars, he said quietly, “Halfway, Benny. Stand by.”

And Benny’s right hand moved imperceptibly to the black button on the top of the box, the red light still flickering.

“We’re in range. I got two hundred fifty yards . . . ”

“When you’re ready, buddy,”

“Okay Benny, NOW !”

“Contact.”

And the choir still sang the heavenly words of Jerusalem:

At which point, Benny’s red light went out. His green light suddenly glowed. And beneath Ibrahim’s yellow school bus the detonator did its work. The eight sets of plastic C-4 high explosive blew upward with a muffled blast, smashing asunder the floor of the bus.

In the same split-second, the two bundles of dynamite exploded with a dull
WHOOOOMPH,
and the fizzing det-chord ripped up into the boxes, unleashing the brutal demolition power that is packed into a ton of ammonium nitrate high-explosive—a homemade carpet bomb that would have obliterated Canaan Academy.

It made short work of the bus. And it caused a blast nothing short of sensational. Flames shot three hundred feet into the air as the bus disintegrated upward, rising fifty feet off the ground in a blazing yellow kaleidoscope, hurling off huge hunks of white-hot metal like the Rings of Saturn gone berserk. It was Nagasaki 1945 in northwest Connecticut.

Officer Tony Marinello’s cruiser took the full brunt of the outward blast. It catapulted over backwards onto its roof, bounced and made another clean half-somersault and landed on its four wheels. Tony, saved by his seat belt, went into shock, watching the burning, twisted wings, doors, seats, and whole swathes of the roof raining down. Three massive oak trees, four hundred years old, with trunks thirty-five feet around, were lying flat on the ground, two of them on fire.

The fertilizer bomb had been built to make sure fifteen hundred people died inside the school. Now the ten riders on the bus, Abu and Ben among them, were halfway across the Bridge to Paradise as the incinerated automatic doors of the school bus, glowing red, finally fell to earth.

“Nice job, Benny,” said Mack Bedford.

“Not too bad yourself, buddy,” replied the Mossad’s chief New York agent.

And the music died in the hall, while the great stone building shuddered to its foundations. No one inside the concert room saw anything. In fact the only living witness to the explosion, aside from Mack and Benny and the police officer, was Ms. Calvert, who had been watching from the window before it cracked from end to end, and now stood in terror of what she had seen.

She somehow sleepwalked to the telephone, dialed 911, and was switched through to the Torrington Police Department, where Buzzy had Tony Marinello on the other line, reporting that a Canaan Academy school bus had just been hit by a bomb. “Whoever had been in that bus could not have survived. Nossir. It’s like fucking Baghdad here,” he confirmed. “Terrorists, sir. They gotta be terrorists. I never saw anything like this.”

The station chief could tell his man was in shock, and he told both Tony and Ms. Calvert he’d have reinforcements out there momentarily, plus the fire department and ambulances.

“I’ll take the reinforcements and the fire trucks,” said Tony, “but don’t need the ambulances. Anyone who was in that bus just got cremated. I’m real certain of that. The metal just melted. You can’t get within a hundred yards of the wreckage, it’s that hot.”

Ibrahim and Yousaf had just turned into the east gate and were making fast time down the north end of the drive when the bus blew. They couldn’t see anything because the academy itself stood between them and Abu’s big yellow time-bomb.