The Last Days (19 page)

The hall again erupted with cheers. For the next ten minutes, the retiring, soft-spoken Al-Hassani outlined the new interim government's mandate and structure. Then he took questions.

“This question is for Mr. Chalabi,” began an Al-Jazeera reporter. “Sir, will you now denounce the United States before the entire international community for committing war crimes in Iraq?”

A hush came over the crowd. It was the question on everyone's mind, and now it had been asked of Achmed Chalabi, arguably the most pro-Western and pro-American Iraqi leader in the room, an exile long backed by American money and political support, now seeking to build a power base in a country he hadn't lived in for decades. With a senior representative of the U.S. government in the room. With the president of the United States and every member of Congress no doubt watching on television. With the U.N. Secretary General watching the press conference in Paris with members of the French Parliament. With vast segments of the Arab and Islamic worlds watching in prime time.

Chalabi cleared his throat, looked the reporter in the eye, and spoke softly.

“If there is one thing I have learned in my lifetime of struggle, it is this: freedom isn't free. Many have died in this war of liberation, and they are heroes. Heroes, I tell you—martyrs of the freedom revolution. We will forever remember their sacrifice. We will forever remember that they died so that we might live, that we might breathe and speak our minds and control our destinies. We will celebrate their lives. We will honor their deaths. We will build great monuments in Baghdad and Tikrit and tell their stories to our children and our grandchildren. But we will not blame foreigners for our suffering. It was Saddam Hussein who did this to us, and it is Saddam Hussein who we and our children and our children's children must denounce every day of our lives.”

The room unexpectedly erupted in sustained cheering, with Mustafa Al-Hassani leading the way. Chalabi lowered his eyes, and stepped back as Al-Hassani stepped up to the podium and the bank of microphones, called for quiet, and then caught everyone off guard, including his own colleagues.

“What is past is past,” Al-Hassani said. “It is time to move forward, and tonight, as my first act in this interim government, I make a proposal.”

Flashbulbs began popping again.

“After we meet the needs of the suffering people of Baghdad—after we get them the medical and humanitarian assistance they need and deserve—I propose we move the capital of Iraq.”

A collective gasp could be heard, even from the gathered dignitaries.

“Baghdad represents the old Iraq, does it not?” the small, slightly stooped man continued. “Does not Baghdad represent Saddam Hussein's Iraq, not our own? Now it is ruined and suffering because of evil ways and bloodthirsty leaders. Why should we rebuild Saddam's capital as it once was? What says we must? Why accept the narrative that Saddam Hussein wrote for us? This is a new day. This is a new chapter. And a new Iraq deserves a new capital, a capital worthy of the rich and proud and glorious history that has long been ours….”

You could hear a pin drop at that moment.

“Tonight, I call upon the great Iraqi nation to build a great new capital city, with the trillions of dollars of new oil money that will soon begin to flow. Like the great economic and political capitals of our sister states all around the Gulf—capitals like Riyadh and Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi—let us believe that out of the barren desert sands can rise towers of steel and glass, practically overnight. Let us build homes and schools and factories and stock exchanges. Let us build museums and theaters and stadiums and gardens. Let us together build a great economic center that rapidly becomes the envy of the world. More precisely, let us
re
build a great political and economic power of global importance where none has existed for thousands of years….”

It was as though a billion viewers leaned in to hear the news for themselves.

“My friends, it is time to rebuild the city of Babylon, the city of our dreams.”

Midnight descended on the Iraqi desert.

The air was cold and black. Storm clouds obscured a full moon. No lights could be seen for miles in any direction. Bitter winds howled through the wadis and canyons and Daoud Juma wondered how much longer it would take.

They were still headed for the town of Al Qa'im and the Syrian border village of Abu Kamal, but both remained quite a ways off. A junior fedayeen officer drove the Renault while Daoud reclined in the backseat and tried unsuccessfully to get some sleep. Ahead of them was the Range Rover packed with commandos and their weapons. Bringing up the rear was the minivan with still more men and supplies.

He checked his watch. It was just before midnight back in Baghdad, not yet four in the afternoon in New York and Washington. He tried to picture what he and his men would be doing twenty-four hours later. Would they have been able to reach Canada yet? Would they have already slipped across the border into the United States? Would the cars be ready? What about the weapons?

If everything went according to plan, each man would regroup in an old cabin tucked away in the high peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, not far from Lake Placid. Everyone had been briefed already, and all of them had been trained on the new GPS equipment. The cabin shouldn't be hard to find. He just hoped they were all as ready for the snow and ice and cold as they insisted they were.

None of these Al-Nakbah shock troops had ever been outside of their home countries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Palestine, other than the last eighteen months they'd spent in Iraq, training night and day at Salman Pak, just outside of Baghdad. All of them were from small towns or desert villages. None of them had any experience in the United States, much less the extreme weather of the Adirondacks or the American northeast. But in every other way they were ready, and he'd have to trust them.

Each had been chosen by commanders he'd personally recruited and trained. Each was in top physical condition. Each was trained either as a sniper or a suicide bomber. And each was ready to give his very life to wage jihad in the belly of the Great Satan. These were men without the slightest trace of fear, and soon enough, they'd have the chance to prove their mettle.

Once safely across the Canadian border into the United States, and once convinced they weren't being tracked, they'd rendezvous at the cabin, set up their shortwave radios, and gather any last-minute intelligence they could about homeland security preparations under way in their target cities. Finally, when all systems were go—when Daoud Juma said the time had come—they would fan out in four teams of three men each.

The first two teams would head to Manhattan. The third team would head to Boston. Daoud himself would lead the fourth team to Chicago. There were, of course, a hundred ways their mission could fail. He knew that better than any of these men, and he was sure his plan had taken all of those ways into account.

Backup teams—men he'd never seen before, never wanted to see or know—would move in through Seattle, others through Tijuana, others through Miami. Some were traveling in groups. Others were traveling alone. Some would head to Las Vegas, some to Phoenix. Some would descend upon Chicago, others on Des Moines. He had a team headed for Montgomery, Alabama. Another was tasked for Jacksonville, Florida, while another was headed for Palm Beach.

What made his plan so brilliant, thought Daoud, was its inherent flexibility. Each individual was responsible for his or her own targets—malls, restaurants, movie theaters, supermarkets, and the like. They weren't required to tell him, or even their fellow cell members, exactly where they were headed, unless they wanted to work together to maximize their destructive impact. They weren't even required to make a final decision on their target package until they got into their assigned city and got the lay of the land.

It wouldn't be difficult to find a highly populated and highly vulnerable strike point. Beyond obvious points of entry, U.S. homeland security was a joke. Thousands of miles of borders were Swiss cheese, and once inside the country most sites that attracted crowds—aside from government buildings and major sporting events—had minimal if any security. Why would they?

Before September 11, 2001, commercial airport security throughout the United States was lax because Americans had never experienced an Islamic kamikaze. They couldn't envision the magnitude of destruction inflicted upon them by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Before November 24, 2010—just last month—
private
aviation security in the United States was effectively nonexistent. No one getting on a private plane was subject to metal detectors or photo ID checks or bomb-sniffing dogs or security procedures of any kind. Why? Because Americans had never really taken seriously the prospects of a private business jet being hijacked and used on a kamikaze mission. Then Saddam Hussein commenced Operation Last Jihad, sent fedayeen trained by Daoud Juma to attack the presidential motorcade outside of Denver International Airport using a Gulfstream IV, and the world had changed forever.

Now it would change again.

Americans had never experienced a wave of suicide bombings and sniper attacks on the order Daoud's Palestinian brethren were inflicting upon the Israelis. Because they'd never seen it happen, they never really believed that it could happen. But they would soon learn. Now Daoud would teach the Great Satan a lesson it would never forget. His men had full authority to switch cities if necessary to maintain operational security. No one but he knew precisely how many fedayeen members were deployed to the United States, and even he would have no idea how many actually got into the country and avoided detection and arrest. The only thing each cell member was encouraged to do, if at all possible, was strike on the same day, or more precisely, the same night.

New Year's Eve.

Just four nights away.

 

Yuri Gogolov didn't like what he was seeing.

Not all of it.

True, the gun battles in the West Bank and Gaza were going better than he could have expected. Every television network in the world—except perhaps state television in North Korea and Cuba—was showing the carnage nonstop, and there was no question the attacks had caught Washington completely by surprise. Moreover, a new scrap of intelligence had just come in from one of Al-Nakbah's informants in Gaza. The source hadn't ever given them anything of particular value in the past, but the initial reports, though sketchy and unconfirmed, were tantalizing, to say the least.

The question was: Were the reports true? Could they actually have stumbled onto the safe house where this Bennett and his team were hiding? It seemed unlikely, but Jibril had convinced him that it wasn't a possibility they could afford to ignore. Not with the stakes so high and the game so hot. Who knew? Maybe they'd get lucky.

That said, however, President MacPherson's speech had been a serious surprise. Gogolov could only admit that to himself, of course. But it was true, and part of being a great chess player meant accepting the state of play as it actually was, not wishing for something that wasn't. The truth was the grand master had been caught off guard. The Israelis were
not
on the move. IDF forces were
not
battling Palestinian forces. Palestinian casualties at the hands of the Jews were
not
occurring at all, much less mounting rapidly.

Instead, the American's speech was winning high marks in every European capital, including Paris and Moscow. The feckless, spineless Mubarak—the faux Pharaoh of Cairo—was actually claiming credit on Radio Monte Carlo and the BBC. It was disgusting, thought Gogolov. Mubarak was telling the world he had personally intervened, demanding that President MacPherson take a hard line toward Doron and keep the Israelis out of the Palestinian territories. And Mubarak was getting away with it.

All that would have been bad enough. But the problem went deeper than that. Something was rumbling on the “Arab Street.”

A new
Jerusalem Post
story quoted Amin Makboul, a senior Fatah official in the West Bank as saying, “The Arab regimes have no credibility. In order to face external challenges, the Arab leaders should give their people freedom and democracy.” Another top Fatah activist, Taisir Nasrallah, told the
Post:
“The entire Arab order is in urgent need of reconstruction. What happened in Baghdad proves that the Arab order is dying.” Muawiyah al-Masri, a Palestinian legislator, added: “What is needed now is the democratization of the Arab world according to the wishes and aspirations of the Arab masses, and not as a result of American pressure.”

Such thinking was heresy, but it was bubbling up everywhere.

“It is not Saddam Hussein who fell. What collapsed are the big lies that accompanied him, praised him, and glorified him,” declared an editorial in the London-based Saudi daily
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.
“In this war [against the Americans], the Arabs were divided into two groups. One claimed that this is a war of survival, a war for honor, a war against the American conspiracy. Another group—silent either because they are in exile abroad or oppressed within Iraq—knew that this was a war of liberation, a war to rid them of a corrupt, murderous regime which should go out as it came in. It is an historical event for the regime, for which there is no precedent. All the past wars were wars with Israel or wars of regimes. But this one is the first of its kind. It is a war against the evil Arab situation.”

Not that Yuri Gogolov cared about the “Arab situation,” evil or otherwise. He wasn't an Arab. He was a pure-blooded Russian—an ultranationalist, to be more precise, though some called him a fascist. He was proud of who he was and what he believed. He had no love for Saddam Hussein or his regime. It was, after all, he and Mohammed Jibril who sold Saddam the tactical nuclear weapons they'd stolen from Russian stockpiles. It was he and Jibril who persuaded Saddam to launch Operation Last Jihad against NATO and the Israelis. It was he and Jibril who, at the last moment—through Stuart Iverson and several other intermediaries—had tipped off the Americans and the Israelis, triggering a war that left Iraq smoldering. And their plan had worked flawlessly.

But Gogolov's mission wasn't to set in motion a wave of democratic capitalism throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Far from it. Gogolov's vision was to restore the glory of Mother Russia, to cleanse her of the capitalist pigs who let mafia bosses and prostitutes run rampant in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to make her a force the world not just feared but worshipped.

To succeed—to reemerge as the world's only superpower and leave the Americans gasping for oxygen—Russia would need to be purified of President Grigoriy Vadim, the whore who ran the country now. He was driving the country's economy into the sewer. He was allowing the army to disintegrate for a lack of funding and expansionist missions. He was allowing Russia's nuclear arsenal to be systematically dismantled. And he was too cozy with the West, with Washington in particular, but also with the Jews.

Russia was no longer a superpower. It could barely be considered a world power at all. Indeed, it was in danger of imploding in a thousand ancient ethnic feuds. The festering rebellion in Chechnya was symptomatic of just how feckless the New Russia really was under Vadim's limp hand. It was time to reverse the decline before it was too late, before Russia was an international laughingstock of bread lines and beggars.

Reviving the Great Russian Empire would not happen overnight. It would take time, leadership, and luck. It would require assassinating President Vadim, no small venture. It would require mounting a putsch—a coup—against Vadim's government and the spineless thieves in the Duma. And once Vadim was gone, then things would really get difficult.

Russia would need hard currency. Massive amounts of hard currency. For that she would need to control the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf. She would need to combine this with her own oil and natural gas reserves. She'd need to control warm-water ports in the south, and the shipping lines used to move the oil to all points east and west. That, in turn, would require an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It was no small undertaking. But it was a goal worthy of their sacrifice. A Russian-Persian axis—a nuclear alliance that was virtually immune from challenge by the United States, NATO, or a newly defanged Iraq—this was precisely the goal for which Gogolov and Jibril were plotting their strategy and making their moves.

They weren't in a hurry. They understood full well that there were pieces on the chess board that needed to be moved around before they put the king in checkmate. But they also knew they weren't simply playing chess against Grigoriy Vadim. They were playing against James “Mac” MacPherson. And now against Jonathan Meyers Bennett. They were up against two idealists, two men infecting the Arab world with Western visions of “free men, free minds, and free markets.”

And it was clear. They must be stopped.

Gogolov picked up the telephone and dialed Mohammed Jibril's private digital cell phone number. It was the wee hours of the morning, too early for either of them. But this could not wait. It was time to counter MacPherson's move. It was time to get back on the offensive. It was time to
force
the Israelis to invade the West Bank and Gaza, douse all this talk of freedom and democracy, and reignite the fires of jihad.

 

Bennett never heard it.

The black phone on the desk in Ziegler's private quarters rang twelve annoying times. But Bennett was still sound asleep on the couch. A disoriented Erin McCoy, startled out of her own nap in the chair beside him, finally managed to grab the receiver on the thirteenth ring. It was Jake Ziegler, calling from the main control room.

Yes, he was well aware of the fact that it was only 2:19
A.M.
Tuesday morning. But back in Washington it was only 7:19
P.M.
Monday evening. The president was about to begin another secure videoconference with his National Security Council and he wanted Bennett and McCoy to join them immediately.