The Brotherhood Conspiracy (61 page)

One of the lights on the telephone console was extinguished.

“Thank you, Eliazar,” said President Whitestone. “You have saved your nation.”

“No, Jonathan . . . I have saved my revenge for the moment when it will do the greatest damage.”

5:45 a.m., Balata Camp, Nablus, West Bank

Sitting at the window, Moussa al-Sadr gazed at the glowing sky to the west. “Your men have done well, Youssef. The fire burns bright on the Temple Mount. We have destroyed the Israeli claim to sovereignty. Tomorrow we call on the world to condemn their arrogance, to isolate the Jews even more.”

Youssef came up behind his master and looked over his shoulder.

“The Tent has burned for a long time, Holy One.”

“Let it burn forever,” said al-Sadr.

Three black-clad, black-masked men moved like wraiths through the empty, dusty street.

On padded feet they approached the house, a stout, wooden door on the ground level, windows dark. But on the second floor, light burned in the room at the front of the building. Moving shadows, they climbed the outside staircase and stopped at the upper door. One bent, worked the lock, and edged the door ajar. The sound of voices came from the front room.

Four men occupied the lit room—a cleric in black robes, looking out through a far window, with a huge, muscled Arab at his side and two, large, armed men who looked and acted like bodyguards.

The masked men waited. Two of them had silenced automatics pointed into the room. When the cleric turned from the window, two muffled spits sliced through the room and each of the guards fell dead. A second pair of muffled shots and the massive Arab was driven back against the far wall. Shaking off the surprise on his face and the two mortal bullet wounds in his chest, Youssef managed one, stumbling step toward the assassins, then fell flat on his face, blood seeping from under his body.

Imam Moussa al-Sadr faced his assassins as the three black-clad men entered the room. He raised his arms, closed his eyes, and prepared to sing out
god is good
—
Allahu Akbar!
—when strong hands grabbed his arms and pinned them to his back and another set of hands grabbed the back of his head and forced a cloth into his mouth.

Al-Sadr opened his eyes. One man in black stood before him. With drama and grace he withdrew the hood. Crown Prince Faisal—eldest son of King Abbudin. Vengeance . . . Sunni vengeance.

Faisal moved so close to al-Sadr’s face, their noses almost touched. His breath smelled of chickpeas and garlic.

“You will bleed a drop for every insult,” said Prince Faisal.

Al-Sadr felt the knife enter his stomach.

“You will bleed a drop for every offense, every slur you heaped upon our father, our family.”

Faisal pulled the knife across al-Sadr’s midsection with the precision and purposefulness of a butcher slicing a filet, the hands confining al-Sadr’s arms behind his back holding the imam steady.

“You will bleed until you die. And we will sit here, and watch you die. And your last thought will be of the House of Saud.”

5:49 a.m., Tel Aviv

The reports from the Temple Mount were getting worse by the minute. Baruk and his bodyguards raced down the steps toward waiting cars.

Three black-clad men moved up along the edges of the driveway, remaining in the shadow of the high hedges. Behind them, the security gate to Baruk’s home was closed and disabled, the gate guards dead at their posts. They came to the first of the two turns in the driveway, just before the hedges gave way to open ground.

All three came to rest at the edge of the hedge. They heard the sounds from above . . . running feet . . . slamming car doors. They tensed, but not because they were about to strike. Instead, each man felt the stab of a thin, razor-sharp blade run through his throat, the honed-edge steel pulled across the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord.

Three other black-clad men now moved out of the hedges and away from the limp bodies. They advanced up the hill toward the house.

5:50 a.m., On the Ashkelon Road

Commander Browne Counsil swung his Comanche into a snap turn left, burped the accelerator, and jumped his helicopter to a position in front of, and above, the Mazda sedan as it continued its retreat back along the road. Counsil floated the Comanche down, a lethal feather, to fifty feet off the ground, and held her steady. He was directly over the road.
This is where it gets tricky.
Reveal himself to the kidnappers in the car and put the women at risk, or remain at height—at a distance—to watch and wait. The safety of the women was paramount. He eased the Comanche back up to one hundred feet. “Pete . . . copy?”

“Roger.”

“I’ve got ’em,” said Counsil. “Over on Route Thirty-Eight. I’m overhead, spy
in the sky. They’ve turned around, heading back east on the road. Seems a bridge suddenly vaporized in front of them. Go back two clicks and land. I’ll materialize when we’re abreast of you and get their attention. You get the women.”

“Roger that.”

“You’ll need to be fast, Pete. No dawdling coming over that ridge. Get there and get the women out.”

“I’ll be there.”

Counsil tripped the turbo in the tail and the Comanche rotated toward the east without a sound. As the car passed underneath him, Counsil felt as if the helicopter was adrift on the night. Sixty miles an hour was like standing still. But he used the opportunity to scan the car with night-vision sensors and heat-seeking thermal imaging. Two bodies in the front; three in the back. From the size of the bodies in the back, the one in the middle was a man. But he didn’t like the looks of the thermal scans. In one of the women, life was fading. He was about to radio his wingman with the information when a strange sight came into view a hundred yards in front of the escaping Mazda.

It was a white man. He looked like he’d been hit by a train—his clothes were shredded, his body was bloodied, his right arm dangled at his side and swung at its own, incoherent rhythm, and he was lurching over a hillock next to the road. He stumbled onto the asphalt roadway, in front of the oncoming car, waving his left arm back and forth. He was trying to stop the Mazda.

Guy looks like a walking MASH unit.

The driver of the car apparently didn’t see this apparition until the last moment. The Mazda went into a skid, across the road, coming to rest straddling the berm on the left side of the road—the oncoming lane.

Mr. MASH Unit took two stumbling steps toward the car . . . and Captain Browne Counsil opened up. He threw on his three, one-kilowatt Xenon Arc floodlights, blinding everyone on the ground, toggled his twenty millimeter nose cannon, and tore up the earth around the front and left side of the car—away from Mr. MASH Unit—and put one, well-placed burst through the car’s engine block.

Counsil dropped the chopper. He figured his only hope was to ground the helicopter with all dispatch and try to reach the women before their captors recovered from the sound and fury of his onslaught.

But as those thoughts were flashing through his mind and the Comanche
was speeding toward a hard landing, a black Humvee hurtled into the picture from the east, ripped into a controlled, high-speed skid, and slammed its rear quarter-panel into the smoking front end of the Mazda. Bedlam ensued as the two-hundred-million-dollar Comanche slammed into the ground and snapped Counsil’s body against his harness.

Without pause, two Israeli soldiers leapt out of the Humvee, Uzis leveled. Right on their heels came a dwarf, shooting an automatic pistol into the sky.

Mr. MASH Unit lurched up to the car, his good arm stretched out in front of him. The dwarf climbed onto the smoking hood of the car, holding the gun in front of him. Counsil could see him screaming at the men in the car. The soldiers ripped open the front doors, pulled two men out, and buried them in the dust. But the women were still in the back seat.

Counsil aimed his spotlights right through the back window of the Mazda, lighting it up like a Hollywood premier. He painted a laser sight on the head of the man in the back seat. But before Counsil could engage a trigger, the man’s head exploded.

Arms through a hole in the car’s windshield, the dwarf held his smoking gun aimed at a point once occupied by the kidnapper’s head.

It was cold tonight. He was surprised about the cold, surprised that he remembered the cold. What was he doing?

He could hear the sirens in the distance better than he could hear the soldier talking to him.

And his arm didn’t work.

Funny. Annie was here. In her nightshirt. But the sleeves were ripped off.

Over there, Sammy Rizzo was kneeling in the dirt and hugging Kallie Nolan. Kinda cold for Kallie to be wearing a tee shirt. And with one of Annie’s sleeves, all gooey, wrapped around her neck. Funny about dreams. Kallie’s eyes were open, but she looked asleep.

Oh, and there was some science fiction flying machine. And it was cold.

But Annie was there. She was smiling at him—holding something up to his head—but tears were running down her cheeks. She said something.

It was cold. But it was all right. Thank God.

5:56 a.m., Saudi Arabia

Dry desert winds pushed against the silk curtains. The king of the Saudis sat cross-legged on the carpet, his back straight, ignoring the support of the large pillows stacked by his side, his eyes as hard as the steel in the dagger he pointed at the other men seated around the carpet.

“Islam is the power of the New World Order,” said Abbudin, “and we are the power of Islam. We have ripped control of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Shi’a heretics. Al-Sadr and the old man of the desert are dead. Our teams of black death will soon eliminate the leaders of the Great Satan. Israel will be crippled, ripe for attack. The United States will be leaderless and vulnerable.

“In a few hours, the Muslim Brotherhood will be united once again . . . united behind a purpose, behind a destiny. All Muslims, one-third of the earth’s population, solemnly dedicated to the fulfillment of Allah’s great prophecy—the restoration of the Caliphate.”

“We have extracted our revenge. Now we will finish what we have begun. And you”—Abbudin pointed at each of the men with the curved tip of his dagger and pierced their hearts with his passion—“you will be the princes of the East.

“There is more than one way to wage jihad. Without oil, the West will be powerless. Jihad has begun . . . the Caliphate will be restored . . . and we will never relinquish the Temple Mount. Jerusalem will be ours. We will no longer bow to the Jews or their infidel Christian allies. There is a new Saladin and the lands of our fathers will once again be under our feet.”

10:57 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Alexandria, VA

A line of limos and SUV escort vehicles pulled into the circular drive of the Alexandria mansion and stopped directly in front of the main doors. A small army of men in suits and earpieces poured out of the cars on both sides, searching the roof, the sky, the trees for any sign of danger.

Jonathan Whitestone stepped out of the presidential limousine and entered Senator Green’s home for the private fund-raiser. The president hated this part of the job, but it was necessary.

None of the men in suits saw the three, black-clad, hooded men slip from the darkness of the Virginia woods that ran close to the southeast corner of the senator’s house.