The Last Days (34 page)

A Samson strike didn't just mean Ziegler and Maroq's deaths. It meant the deaths of all those coming after them, and the complete and utter destruction of Gaza Station as well. It was the worst-case scenario for any American in a hot combat zone. And, ironically, it had been invented right there in Gaza.

“Very well. Samson strike approved. May God be with you guys.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ziegler replied, his voice flat and unemotional. “And may God bless the United States of America.”

With that, all radios fell silent as every man—those engaged in the firefight on the ground, and those flying overhead—contemplated the fate of the two Central Intelligence operatives about to meet their maker.

Sixty seconds later, two AV-8B Harrier fighter jets streaked across the sky. They locked on their target—the flaming rubble of the Hotel Baghdad, swarming yet again with more Palestinian militants trying to break in—and unleashed a salvo of air-to-ground missiles. Massive plumes of fire and smoke filled the skies of Gaza.

Barely four minutes later, a B-2 bomber on strip alert at an Israeli air base in the Negev—just in case—arrived on target. The flight crew double-checked the coordinates and received strike confirmation from Br'er Rabbit, circling and down the coast on Storm One. Then, with all systems go, the B-2 released its cargo and bolted for home.

The two-thousand-pound “bunker buster” hit the remains of the Hotel Baghdad dead center. In the blink of an eye, everyone and everything inside Gaza Station and a one-block radius was incinerated in a hellish inferno that would burn for weeks.

Word spread rapidly as radio and television networks led with the story. Within minutes, everyone in Gaza knew what had happened—everyone, that is, but Bennett and his team underground in the sewers.

 

At first they thought it was an earthquake.

There'd already been four in the past seventy-two hours—in Turkey, in India, another in Japan, and a monster in Tangshen, China. All measured over 7.0 on the Richter scale, and the combined death toll was already in the tens of thousands.

The ground shook violently, more violently than anything Bennett, McCoy, or their team had ever experienced. The intensity of shock wave and the roar of the explosion surging through the sewage tunnel shook them to their core. It knocked all of them off their feet, just as the last of them were climbing up another silo, into the basement of Alpha Zone.

And then it got worse. A wave of superheated air began howling through the underground tunnel system. McCoy suddenly realized the danger they were in.

“Get up—keep moving—go, go, let's go,”
she shouted, sensing what was coming.

Tariq was already up the thirty-foot silo. So were Nazir, Sa'id, and Galishnikov. All were soaked and filthy and trying to catch their breath for a moment in the cold damp basement of the café. Bennett was halfway up. McCoy was just starting up the lowest rung, as Hamid awaited his turn.

Bennett turned back to see what was going on. McCoy shouted at him to move faster. She was scrambling up the metal ladder—freezing cold and covered in all kinds of unimaginable filth—and closing in on him.

All of them could feel the temperature spiking. Hamid struggled to stay on his feet as the fiery winds raged through the tunnel. As Bennett reached the top, he grabbed Tariq's hand and pulled himself up the last few inches and turned back to help McCoy. The silo was shaking. The entire basement was shaking and the ceiling of the half-century-old structure seemed about to collapse. Bennett was terrified McCoy might slip off the slippery metal rungs, but she was holding on for dear life. She was three-quarters of the way up and moving fast. A few more feet and she'd be safe.

“Come on, come on, Erin—I've got you!”
yelled Bennett, his arms and hands straining for her.

Suddenly, McCoy's left hand lost its grip. Her right hand began slipping as well. She screamed. So did Bennett. Her eyes went wide. She was dangling over an abyss with only seconds before a firestorm consumed them.

“Tariq, grab my feet!”
Bennett shouted as he moved headfirst further into the silo, desperate to grab hold of her.

An instant later, he could feel not just Tariq but Nazir holding his legs and belt. He carefully inched himself lower. His hands shook as he strained farther to reach her. Sweat was pouring off his face. Noxious fumes came rushing up at him. He could see the fear in her eyes. He could see Hamid coughing violently. Her fingers were slipping—a little farther, a little farther.

“No, no!”
Bennett screamed.

He could see her first finger peel off the rung, then another, then…

His hand made contact. He grabbed her right wrist, just as her entire hand slipped free. McCoy screamed, her body twisting and jerking in the surging winds.

“I got her, I got her—pull me up!”
he screamed as his fingers and nails dug into her wrist, desperate not to let her slip away.

Tariq and Nazir braced themselves and yanked hard. Bennett now grabbed hold of McCoy's other wrist and squeezed.

“Again, pull up, pull up!”

The two men yanked again and again and with one final tug, pulled Bennett and McCoy to the point where she could get her feet back on the metal ladder. With Bennett's help—his hands still locked like a vise around her wrists—she scrambled out of the silo and into his arms. He pulled her to himself and rolled out of the way. She was safe, but there was no time to take comfort.

Bennett and Tariq turned back to help Hamid. He was struggling to hold on to the lowest rung. The look of terror and helplessness in his eyes was haunting, but there was nothing they could do. Bennett wanted to look away, but he couldn't. He began moving back into the silo, to help Hamid as he'd helped McCoy. But it was too late.

Just as Bennett and Tariq peered down into the silo, the firestorm reached Hamid. With their eyes locked on his, they saw him disintegrate in a wall of flame. His flesh and muscles literally melted away from his bones right as the flames shot up the silo, threatening to incinerate them all. Tariq pulled Bennett away. He pivoted fast, cleared the silo and slammed the metal hatch down, just in time.

A damp basement—glowing orange and red just seconds before—was now pitch-black. The floor was shaking uncontrollably. The demons below raced forward, hunting new victims. But Bennett and his team were safe. Trembling, terrified, but safe.

Four Gold Team commandos burst through the basement door, weapons at the ready, lasers and flashlights shining into the darkness.

“Gold Leader, this is Gold Six. I have the package. I say, again, I have the package. They are secure. Repeat, they are secure. Requesting immediate extraction. Have medical personnel standing by when we arrive.”

“Roger that, Gold Six. Storm Five is inbound. Stand by for extraction.”

 

Three minutes later, “the package” was gift wrapped.

Bennett and his team were onboard Storm Five, skimming over the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean, surrounded by a team of navy SEALs and four Super Cobras ready to blow away anyone who got in their path.

Sa'id and Galishnikov were lying down in the back of Storm Five. They were attended by a team of medics who hooked each man up to IVs and began treating them for shock. Tariq and Nazir were huddled in the back, each under a thick wool blanket, sipping hot coffee and keeping to themselves.

Bennett and McCoy were also wrapped in blankets. From their seats just over the shoulders of the pilots, they could see the horizontal rains pelting the front windshield as the wipers swooshed back and forth at high speed. They could feel the intense winds buffeting the chopper, and after a few minutes, the faint outline of the USS
Ronald Reagan
appeared a few miles ahead. The deck looked hardly bigger than a postage stamp, and the sharp, shooting pains in Bennett's abdomen grew worse.

Neither of them had ever landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier before. The last time Bennett had been extracted by a SEAL team—out of Dr. Mordechai's house in Jerusalem—he'd been taken to Ben Gurion International Airport, put on a navy medical transport plane, and flown to Germany, via Incirlik in Turkey. But he'd been unconscious the whole time. Now he could see the pitching, heaving carrier all too well, tossed about like a toy boat in a bathtub.

“Don't worry,”
said Captain Lance “Buzz” Howard, a nineteen-year navy veteran.
“We'll be fine.”

Bennett wasn't so sure. But he didn't have the strength to ask questions. These guys had just saved his life. He'd just have to trust they wouldn't let him crash into the Atlantic. The deck of the
Reagan
was coming in fast now, and the Seahawk began its slow, careful descent from just over fifteen hundred feet. A few seconds later, they could feel steel crunching steel. The Seahawk's motors shut down immediately, and all of them breathed a huge sigh of relief. Minutes later, a flash traffic message reached Washington.

 

0107L DEC 29 2010

>>
FLASH TRAFFIC
<<

FROM: USS RONALD REAGAN

TO: NMCC, PENTAGON //OPS//

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM //OPS//

NSC, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//

DCI, CIA-LANGLEY, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//

CLAS—EYES ONLY—PRIORITY ALPHA

SUBJECT: OPERATION BRIAR PATCH

 

Package arrived…principals safe…one (1) KIA, Hamid Al-Shahib.

 

Transfer to “Mount of Olives” by 1800 local time tomorrow. Professor en route, as requested…. Sunday arrival.

 

>>end<<

An American noose tightened around the neck of the radicals.

The Defense Intelligence Agency issued an eyes-only report to the president and the Pentagon listing the most dangerous extremists in the Palestinian arsenal—names, photographs, dossiers. This was augmented by a top-secret report by the CIA listing all suspected Al-Nakbah insurgents, as well as hard new intel from the Palestinian Legislative Council. There were well over two hundred names on the combined most-wanted list. Each name had a bullet next to it, and it was open season.

One by one, U.S. Special Forces—led by Delta operators, SEALs, army Rangers and a handful of Green Berets—were hunting down the men who had long terrorized the civilian Palestinian population and were now eating their own. Hour by hour, air-to-ground missiles fired by U.S. Air Force and Navy jets slammed into police stations and municipal buildings in Gaza City, Ramallah, Hebron, Jericho, and points in between.

Most of the targets were headquarters or field offices of the twelve different Palestinian security organizations operating during the Age of Arafat. Some were freshly verified headquarters of the various Palestinian rogue forces controlled by Mohammed Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, and Marwan Barghouti. Each was a command-and-control center for the prosecution of the bloodiest war in the history of the West Bank and Gaza, a Palestinian war against itself.

Top officials of the Palestinian Legislative Council—many of them barricaded inside the communications center underneath the PLC's bombed-out headquarters in downtown Gaza—were now in direct and hourly contact with Jack Mitchell and Danny Tracker at CIA, and General Mutschler, operating out of the NMCC at the Pentagon. Their cooperation and inside information was proving absolutely invaluable, as were tidbits coming in from Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence and, of course, critical though completely confidential Israeli intelligence assistance from Shin Bet and Mossad agents still on the ground inside the territories.

A number of Israeli intelligence operatives disguised as Arabs—some as older Arab women, covered in traditional robes and scarves—were assisting U.S. air and ground forces, weaving in and out of heavy population centers, helping mark targets and identify radical safe houses. Others eavesdropped on Palestinian military radio frequencies, intercepted cell and land-line telephone calls and e-mails and monitored all long-distance lines. They provided rapid translations, summaries, and even full transcripts when needed to their American counterparts—directly to Langley, at times, or to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, if the information was of imminent military value.

None of this was publicly acknowledged, of course. Nor would it ever be. The Israelis didn't want credit for ripping up the last vestiges of a mafia empire. Washington didn't want to give it.

Armed with such real-time, actionable intel and surprisingly solid though no doubt temporary international support for defending Palestine from the Israelis without and the extremists within, Washington held nothing back. The president's rationale wasn't complicated. The faster the operation could be completed, the better the chances for peace, and the better the chances of staving off universal condemnation by the Arab world and the United Nations as a whole if the operation bogged down and civilian casualties began mounting. And the only way to get done quickly was to strike with overwhelming force.

This was not a Pentagon photo op. There were no reporters, American or otherwise, embedded into the operation. This was an unprecedented opportunity to smash the Palestinian terror network once and for all, and to see if peace had any chance whatsoever of taking root in the rocky, barren soil of the territories, long poisoned by bitterness and blood. Thus, within forty-eight hours of the first American boots on the ground, a total of two thousand U.S. troops and Special Forces were airlifted into the theater. Dozens of U.S.-owned and -operated M-1 Abrams tanks, Humvees, and Bradley fighting vehicles were moved in as well, and were now choking off every major artery into the West Bank and Gaza.

Ostensibly, the heavy mechanized forces were there to keep the Israelis out. At least, that's what the press and public were told. More to the point, such hardware and the troops that operated them were tasked with keeping suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel. Any new Israeli deaths by Muslim extremists could force Doron's hand, making it politically impossible for him not to order punitive strikes into Palestinian nerve centers.

MacPherson was taking a huge risk, and he knew it. But once committed, he pulled out all the stops. If the United States was going to “own” Palestine for the next few weeks, it was going to stop at nothing to make sure every known and suspected terrorist was taken off the streets.

“I want Israel blocked from any possible incursion into Palestinian areas, and I want Palestinian terrorists hunted down and rounded up until they're gone, all of them—no exceptions, no regrets.”

That was the blunt message he'd delivered to the troops through armed forces radio, and that was the sound bite that led the evening news Wednesday night in the United States and throughout the world. According to the White House, it was a MacPherson original—unscripted and unrehearsed. Or so went the spin from the press office and their surrogates. Either way, it was having its intended effect. International and congressional support was holding, for the moment at least.

Also as much under the heading of international public relations as operational necessity, U.S. forces were taking special care to secure Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy sites, and had done so from the opening hours of Operation Palestinian Freedom. Just three hours after Bennett and his team were extracted from Gaza, U.S. Ranger teams fast roped into Bethlehem to surround the Church of the Nativity, the traditional memorial site of Jesus' birth.

Israeli intelligence had started picking up reports that suicide bombers were planning to attack the church and destroy it in a lightning-quick raid. Doron ordered those reports sent immediately to the Pentagon and CIA, where officials—to their credit—moved quickly and decisively to avoid a religious and archaeological catastrophe of the first order.

The president ordered in the Rangers. Within hours, sites like Rachel's Tomb and Abraham's Tomb were being secured by U.S. forces, as were two dozen other sites on a list personally drawn up by Prime Minister Doron and faxed to the president. Every few hours, Press Secretary Chuck Murray stepped back to the podium to announce an updated list of holy sites that were now secure in American hands. At Marsha Kirkpatrick's suggestion—and the president's approval—Murray also did his first live broadcast interviews with Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi Television, as well as an informal press “gaggle” with reporters from Arab and other Muslim countries.

It was a full court press, and this White House was working all the angles.

Nadir Hashemi was glued to CNN.

Holed up in a $49-a-night motel room by a truck stop in rural Arkansas, just outside of Little Rock, he was taking no chances. Not anymore, at least.

Less than an hour after he'd crossed the border, the United States went to Threat Level Red, triggering an immediate closure of all borders and the most sweeping security lockdown in U.S. history. But for nearly twenty-four hours, the Viper had been oblivious to any of it.

He hadn't been listening to the radio. He'd pulled into rest stops only long enough to fill his tank and empty his bladder, never long enough to watch television or listen to the frantic talk of fellow diners, worrying about what this new war in and for the Holy Land might mean to them. It might have been a fatal mistake. What he didn't know
could
kill him, Nadir told himself. He had to be more careful, and that meant tracking the news on the hour.

The FBI, he quickly learned, was conducting a massive manhunt in the United States, Canada, and Mexico for a Mrs. Ruth Bennett, the sixty-nine-year-old mother of Jonathan Meyers Bennett, the senior White House advisor and chief architect of the administration's Arab-Israeli peace plan apparently now scuttled by the violence spreading throughout the territories and the introduction of U.S. peacemaking and peacekeeping forces. In light of the nation's threat level, officials were listing the woman as missing and presumed kidnapped, and the FBI and DHS—Department of Homeland Security—were offering a reward of $5 million for any information leading to the safe retrieval of Mrs. Bennett, and the indictment and conviction of the perpetrators.

At the same time, a massive federal and international manhunt was under way in search of anyone who could even remotely be a possible suicide bomber, inside or headed for the United States. Palestinians and those of Arab origin were prime suspects, of course, and all sorts of organizations in Washington and Detroit were crying foul and raising red flags about the prospect of mass numbers of civil liberties violations.

But a report a few hours ago on MSNBC quoted an unnamed senior Homeland Security Department source saying officials had reason to believe a small handful of non-Arabs might also have been recruited to carry out the attacks. Speculation seemed to be centering on young to middle-aged American and European women who were currently dating or were married to men of Middle East descent, or had done so within the last three to five years.

Meanwhile, the airtight security federal officials initially imposed only on Washington for the president's return from the NATO summit in Madrid was now being replicated in major cities throughout the country, particularly those up and down the eastern seaboard. This posed a serious problem.

Nadir was hoping to pick up his supply of plastic explosives from a sleeper agent in Atlanta, and several firearms from another contact in Savannah. From there, the plan was to try to slip into Washington or New York for New Year's Eve. But he was still at least a good ten to twelve hours away from Atlanta, and it was almost midnight Thursday, the thirtieth of December. At this point, there was almost no way he could reach his intended target on schedule. With all the roadblocks, checkpoints, and other security measures up across the country, it would be hard enough to connect with his suppliers on time.

Nadir let out a string of curses in Arabic. The world had gone mad. Palestine was burning. Gaza was on fire. And American infidels were desecrating the land of his mother and her family. He seethed with a rage he'd for so long controlled. He wanted to bolt. He wanted to jump back in the car, pop down more amphetamines and tromp on the accelerator. He could make it to Atlanta in less than a day. He had to. But how?

It wasn't a matter of mileage and ground speed. He had to be careful. He had to watch his back and his steps. He couldn't afford to be caught speeding, or under the influence of narcotics. He couldn't afford to be caught at all. His father and brothers were counting on him. So was his mother, wherever she was in a Paradise that awaited them all. His rage would find its outlet. The Great Satan would feel his fury.

Patience, Nadir,
he could hear his mother whisper.

Patience, young man, and you will go far.

 

The morning sun was not yet visible on the Mount of Olives, the site chosen for the Israeli and newly appointed Palestinian prime ministers for the beginning of their peace talks.

Nor would it be that Friday. Storms still blackened the skies, though the forecast called for a break in the wind and rain over the next few days. Not that it mattered to Jon Bennett, his team or the two prime ministers in his care. They weren't anywhere near the real Mount of Olives. They were now half a world away from Jerusalem, in a labyrinth of caves and secret military bunkers, deep inside a mountain of Jurassic limestone, drilled at great cost by British forces trying to defend Europe from the Nazi's gathering storm.

The “Mount of Olives” was a code name handpicked by President MacPherson, and it was a name known to only a few dozen U.S. military and intelligence officers, a handful of senior White House and State Department officials, and the British prime minister and his top staff. It referred to the secure, undisclosed location of the peace talks about to begin, and every measure was being taken to prevent that location from leaking out. There were, after all, lives at stake, and there were men who would stop at nothing to destroy the lives of those now gathered in this mountain. Thus, of the few people entrusted to know the term “Mount of Olives,” fewer still knew precisely to what it referred. Even Bennett and McCoy didn't know, not until they'd arrived under the cover of darkness at a place most simply called the Rock.

Towering over the entrance to the Mediterranean, the Rock of Gibraltar was three miles long and fourteen hundred feet high. The ancient world considered it one of the two Pillars of Hercules—the other being the North African Mount Hacho on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar—not to mention the very “ends of the earth.” The tiny peninsula below the Rock was only six and a half square miles in size and home to less than thirty thousand people. But however one measured it physically, Gibraltar was of incalculable strategic value—the choke point between Europe and North Africa, the gateway to the Mediterranean.