The Last Days (25 page)

Suddenly, two tremendous explosions went off, one to his right, one on his left. The concussion of the blasts—one right after another—knocked him off his feet and sent his machine gun and night-vision goggles flying. He skidded along the ground, drenched to the bone and freezing cold. Then came another shower of gunfire.

Momentarily unable to see or hear, Ben David scrambled forward until he reached the eastern porch of the mosque, desperately trying to get out of the line of fire. Only then did he realize his head and face were raked by shrapnel and shards of glass. He could feel himself shaking, about to slip into shock. He feverishly wiped smoke and blood out of his eyes. That's when he saw a guard charging toward him.

Through the blood gushing from his forehead down across his face, he could see the old man was at least sixty, white hair, white beard. Even through the rains he could see the two pistols the man brandished, one in each hand. They were firing again and again and again as the man raced toward him. He could see the flashes. He could hear the explosions. And then he felt the fiery rounds smash into his chest and arms and face and it was all over. The battle was done. The Temple Mount Battalion had failed.

It was 11:17
P.M.
in D.C., 6:17
A.M.
in Israel and the territories.

All the key principals were present and accounted for. Joining from Gaza Station were Jake Ziegler, Erin McCoy, and Bennett.

“OK, let's go, what have we got?” the president began, taking a sip of fresh coffee and anxious to get moving.

“Mr. President,” Kirkpatrick began, “over the last few hours, we have seen the crisis in the Middle East take a serious turn for the worse.”

She walked the president through an executive summary of each suicide bombing, the fact that no Palestinian group had yet taken credit, and an overall casualty count.

“How many Americans?” the president demanded.

“At last count, we're looking at forty-one Americans dead.”

MacPherson couldn't speak.

“All of them were students at Tel Aviv University, Mr. President—part of the Overseas Student Program, some for one semester, some for two.”

The room was silent.

“So far, fifty-two Israelis are dead, and three Canadians,” Kirkpatrick continued. “Israelis wounded at this point—let's see, it looks like two hundred and thirteen. An American family of six were also wounded at the bus station in Haifa.”

It was the first Bennett had heard of the attacks. He hadn't had time to be briefed by McCoy or Ziegler, and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. A gasp rippled through the NSC team, as well. They were all professionals. They'd all seen civilian carnage before. But the images on the screens were unreal, as were their political implications. The dynamic was changing, rapidly.

“Sir, unfortunately, that's not all. In the last few minutes, an obscure Jewish extremist group—”

“Terrorist group,” interjected the CIA Director.

“—terrorist group known as the Temple Mount Battalion launched a series of attacks against the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque, armed with over a hundred pounds of C4 plastic explosives, about thirty or forty grenades, light arms and several thousand rounds of ammunition.”

“Oh, my God,” said the president. “Please don't tell me they succeeded.”

Kirkpatrick dialed up a live video image from a billion-dollar, American-made Keyhole spy satellite orbiting over Jerusalem, cross-linked from the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia.

“Almost, sir—but not quite.”

“How many were there?”

“We're monitoring all Israeli police and Border Patrol radio traffic. Best we can tell so far is that there were somewhere between ten to fifteen terrorists. Most are dead. It seems as though the Israelis have at least two of the attackers in custody, wounded but likely to survive.”

“Jack, what do you think the Israelis will do?” the president asked.

The president considered Jack Mitchell a close friend and a first-rate spy, a man whose judgment he could trust, a rare commodity in a town like Washington.

“I know for a fact Doron is meeting with his Security Cabinet right now,” said Jack Mitchell. “My sense is that in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, they're going to come out of there ready to unleash everything they've got against the Palestinians.”

“Should they?” asked the president.

“If they don't, they're inviting more Jewish terrorists to take matters into their own hands. I'd recommend, sir, that you call Doron and give him the green light immediately.”

The president looked around the room. Mitchell had a good point. But none of them yet knew what Bennett knew.

 

“Forget the Americans, Avi—we need to get on the offense.”

Yossi Ben Ramon, the fifty-eight-year-old, take-no-prisoners, chain-smoking head of Israel's internal security forces known as the Shin Bet, was furious. He hadn't slept all night. He and his team had suffered one disastrous failure after another, hour after hour. Scores of Israelis were dead and critically wounded as a result. And then came the crisis on the Temple Mount. Ben Ramon wanted Palestinian heads to roll, not his own. He was pushing for a crushing invasion of the West Bank and Gaza within the hour.

Mossad chief Avi Zadok wasn't so sure. Somehow, they'd been spared the worst-case scenario on the Temple Mount. The Dome and the mosque were intact, effectively untouched and unharmed. It had been a bloody affair. It exposed serious deficiencies in Shin Bet's domestic intelligence gathering and analysis. And it had given them all a terrifying reminder of just how serious an unthwarted Jewish terrorist attack against such revered Islamic religious sites would be. Israel again, somehow, had dodged a bullet. They should be grateful, not foolish. Now was not the time to send fifteen or twenty thousand troops into Palestinian strongholds—certainly not to distract attention from Yossi Ben Ramon's incompetence. Now was the time to sit tight and ride out the storm.

Prime Minister David Doron sat behind the large conference table and listened to his senior aides battle it out. At this point, the room was split. On the pro-invasion side were Ben Ramon and General Uri “the Wolf” Ze'ev, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. On the anti-invasion side were Defense Minister Chaim Modine and Brigadier General Yoni Barak, head of Aman, Israeli military intelligence. The foreign minister and deputy prime minister were both out of the country, in London and Moscow, respectively. The rest of the Security Cabinet members were still on their way.

Doron knew he didn't have much time. Israelis were calling for blood, and understandably so. The past few hours had seen the worst terrorist attacks inside of the Green Line in nearly five years, not counting the “four horsemen” attack on Jon Bennett's team inside Jerusalem the month before.

 

“Mr. President, I'm afraid we've got something else.”

“Can it wait? We need to make a decision and get to the Israelis ASAP.”

“I realize that, Mr. President,” Kirkpatrick concurred. “But this is an extremely serious development, and it may have bearing on what you decide.”

“All right, just make it fast.”

Kirkpatrick gave the floor to Defense Secretary Burt Trainor.

“Mr. President, last night one of our patrols operating in Western Iraq intercepted a convoy of three vehicles headed for the Syrian border. The convoy was preparing to fire a surface-to-air missile at one of our Apache helicopters. That vehicle and its occupants were destroyed. The lead vehicle attempted to evade capture. It opened fire on a second Apache. It, too, was neutralized.”

“And?” MacPherson pressed, eager to get to the point.

“Sir, the middle vehicle was stopped. Its two occupants were captured and taken into custody. For the past twenty-four hours or so, we've been interrogating the prisoners and trying to confirm their identities. Turns out, we hit the jackpot.”

“Who'd you get?” asked the vice president.

“Both are senior members of the fedayeen forces. What's interesting about these two—particularly the one named Daoud Juma—is that they're both Palestinian. They're both responsible for training Palestinian suicide bombers.”

“That's about right,” Jack Mitchell nodded.

“Go on,” said the president.

“We believe Juma is the head of the fedayeen forces, responsible for engineering the deaths of more than four hundred people worldwide, mostly Jews and Christians. One of the reasons he's been so effective and stealthy over the years is that he does much of his terrorist training outside the borders of Iraq, mostly in the Bekaa Valley, along the border of Lebanon and Syria.”

“OK, I'm with you, Mr. Secretary,” said the president with genuine appreciation. “But connect the dots here. What's the immediate threat?”

“Mr. President, we've been interrogating Daoud Juma pretty intensely over the past day, as well as the other guy we captured with him, a guy who appears to be Juma's senior deputy. A few hours ago, the deputy began to break.”

“What'd he say?”

“He says a massive new terrorist operation is being planned against the U.S.”

The mood throughout the Situation Room and Gaza Station instantly darkened. “Over the next few days, we're looking at two dozen Palestinian suicide bombers attempting to infiltrate the homeland to attack civilian population centers.”

“Oh, my God,” gasped the president.

“What kind of targets are we talking about?” asked DHS Secretary James.

“Mr. Secretary, the targets we've identified so far include New York, Washington, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, and Orlando. But we must add that there may be targets we don't know about.”

“Orlando?” Bennett interrupted.

“Disney World would be our guess,” the defense secretary responded. “But I can't confirm that. Not yet.”

McCoy's stomach tightened. She quickly looked over at Bennett and could read the anxiety on his face. They'd both been trying to call Bennett's mom every few hours to let her know Jon was safe. But neither had gotten through. Perhaps Ruth Bennett was staying with friends. Perhaps she'd gone to see her sister in Buffalo. There were any number of reasons why she wasn't home, or wasn't answering, and none of them were necessarily bad. But sharp pains again began shooting through Bennett's stomach.

“Go on, Burt,” said the president, his anger rising at the thought of a wave of suicide bombers coming to unleash
their
evil on
his
country.

“Well, sir, as of this moment we can't confirm many of the operational details. We can confirm the basic outline of the original—and I stress,
original
—plan. As we understand it, the original plan called for teams to begin slipping out of Iraq and into Syria. We don't know if any operatives have already left. We're working on several angles, and the interrogations continue.”

“When are we talking about?” asked FBI director Scott Harris.

“It's sketchy, but I think we're probably looking at New Year's Eve. But again, we must be clear that the attacks may not be linked to any specific day or event at all.”

“Mr. President?”

It was Bennett.

“Yes, Jon?”

“Sir, I hate to bother you with this, especially right now, but—”

“What is it, Jon? You don't look so good.”

“Mr. President, it's just that…well, sir, my mother lives in Orlando.”

“I know. Did you call her like I—”

MacPherson stopped in midsentence. The moment seemed to freeze in time. The president suddenly registered what Bennett was saying.

“Tell me you've been in touch with her, Jon. Tell me you called her.”

“I've been calling every few hours. So has Erin. There's been no answer, sir. I'm trying to tell myself there's a reasonable explanation, but now…”

The president turned to Scott Harris and ordered the FBI to work with Orlando P.D. to figure out what was going on. Maybe there was a simple explanation. But everyone now feared the worst. They had a serious crisis brewing, and Orlando might just be the tip of the iceberg.

 

MacPherson forced himself to stay focused.

“How will they get to the U.S.?” he asked.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs took that one.

“The evidence our teams have pieced together from Daoud Juma's vehicle, laptop and cell phone—together with the interviews with Juma and the driver—suggest the teams will make their way to Canada and Mexico, infiltrate our borders, and prepare to strike,” said General Mutschler. “What's not clear is whether they'll link up with sleeper agents here, or operate on their own.”

“Either way, they'll be tough to track,” noted the FBI director.

“And tough to stop,” added the Homeland Security secretary. “We can deploy more forces to the borders. But who are we looking for? We've got an extensive database of Middle East terrorists, suspected terrorists, and people with ties to terrorist individuals, groups, or states. But everyone we know about is already on our watch lists. What I worry about is the threat from people we don't know about.”

“How will they get explosives into the country?” asked Deputy Secretary of State Cavanaugh.

“It wouldn't be hard, I'm afraid,” said Scott Harris. “It's a two-thousand-mile border. We've got a quarter of a million people coming into the U.S. from Canada every single day. And those are the legal ones, the ones we know about. Heck, we've got five thousand trucks coming southbound through Detroit alone every single day. Along the Mexican border, down in Laredo, for example, we've got more than four thousand trucks coming northbound into the U.S. We've done an awful lot to toughen our border defenses. You guys know all that. You authorized the money. But look, no matter how much we've done to tighten things up, getting weapons or explosives into the country by truck or container ship is a whole lot easier than trying to get a bomb or a box cutter onto a plane at JFK or O'Hare or LAX.”

The Israelis were intercepting between forty and fifty Palestinian suicide bombers a month. They were keeping the toll of casualties quite low, given the constant threats they were facing. But they had decades of experience and a country smaller than New Jersey. How would the U.S. do, thought Bennett, trying to protect a continent?

“Why now?” the president asked Jack Mitchell.

“Retaliation after Iraq, the peace process, an attempt to finish their attack on you—there could be any number of reasons why they'd try to strike now.”

“Marsha, what do you make of all this?”

“Well, sir, assuming the story we're piecing together here is accurate, my first instinct is that it's unlikely the attacks will be against major Washington or political targets. It would likely be more random. That would certainly follow the history of the attacks in Israel—random, devastating violence designed to terrify the population and paralyze the economy.”