The Last Days (5 page)

Bennett could see it clearly now. To misunderstand the nature of evil is to risk being blindsided by it. For evil, unchecked, is the prelude to genocide.

It wasn't all Muslims. Most gave their religion mere lip service. But radical, fundamentalist Islam required jihad, a war of annihilation against Christians, Jews, and Western culture and modernity. It was a lethal virus in the global body politic. It was an unholy war, and it was winner take all. There could be no truce, no cease-fire, no
hudna,
as it was known in Arabic. You were either on offense, or you were losing. Fast or slow, it didn't matter, and time was not on your side.

He couldn't just lie there and do nothing. Friends of his—men and women willing to put their lives on the line to protect him—were being slaughtered. Last time it was Deek Black. This time it was Mancuso. But it could have been McCoy. It could have been him. At least the last time he'd gone down fighting. At least the last time he'd tried to fight back. Bennett could feel his heart racing. His hands were trembling. His face felt hot. A surge of anger so intense and so foreign it scared him even more began forcing its way to the surface.

The thoughts rushing through Bennett were alien to everything he'd been taught to believe. They smacked of the very intolerance and judgmentalism he'd been so relentlessly warned against back at Georgetown and Harvard. But what was “tolerance” in the face of terror? Wasn't it surrender? Wasn't it social suicide?

Suddenly—without warning—Bennett began to move. He grabbed the machine gun, scrambled out from under the limousine, and took aim at the two hooded men who'd just shot Mancuso. Now they were charging at him. It was kill or be killed. It was winner take all, and he could see fire coming from the barrels of their AK-47s. He'd been here before. He'd looked into a killer's eyes. Bennett raised the AK-47, pulled the trigger and didn't let go. In a fraction of second, he emptied the entire clip, riddling the two men with dozens of rounds until they collapsed just fifteen or twenty yards away. They were screaming and thrashing about in pain and rage. And then, their bodies and screams went silent.

McCoy was stunned. She just stood there, mesmerized by the two lifeless bodies, taken off guard by Bennett's sudden engagement.

“Erin, we can't stay here—we've got to move out now.”

Bennett wheeled around. He saw two men sprinting through the flames at the other end of the courtyard. Then he heard the incoming sizzle.

“Get down—get down—RPG.”

Bennett hit the deck, bringing McCoy down with him. He covered her body with his own as the rocket-propelled grenade came whistling through the gates. It missed McCoy's head. It missed his own by no more than a few inches, and barely missed the limo as well. Bennett could still see the smoke of the RPG's trail slicing the air above them, across Snapshot's hood. The missile hit the PLC building. The ferocious explosion sent another massive shock wave through the compound. But it was the image of McCoy almost having her head blown off that changed everything.

“
You two, in the car—now,
” Bennett demanded, pointing to Galishnikov and Sa'id, then turned to McCoy. “
Get them in—everybody—let's go.
”

Bennett pulled Sa'id and Galishnikov out from under the car. He shoved them into the backseat of the vehicle that now had to save their lives. Then he looked down at Mancuso's crumpled body. He checked his pulse—just to be sure—but it was too late. He was gone. He and McCoy lifted Mancuso's body. They carefully set it inside the car, along with his MP-5 and the Sig-Sauer pistol inside his jacket pocket. McCoy climbed in beside him, slammed the door behind her, and covered Mancuso's body with coats.

Bennett grabbed Mancuso's earpiece and radio, put them on himself, jumped into the driver's seat, pulled the door closed behind him, and hit the automatic door locks.

“Halfback, this is Snapshot—can you hear me?”

Max Banacci—six foot three inches tall, former Army Ranger turned lead DSS agent for the assault teams—responded immediately.

“Bennett, that you? Where's Donny? Where's McCoy?”

“Mancuso's dead. McCoy's with me. I've got Galishnikov and Sa'id. We've got to get out of here—now.”

“No, no,”
Banacci insisted. “
We can't just leave these guys here. We've got to
—”

“Banacci, it's over. We've got to get out of here—now.”

“
No way. If Mancuso's down then I'm in charge now and I say we stay until
—”

“Until what? We're all dead? Forget it. I work for the White House. You work for me. Now get us the hell out of here before the rest of the peace process goes up in flames.”

“You're out of your mind, Bennett!”
Banacci shouted.
“We don't leave until we get the last man out. No one gets left behind. That clear enough for you?”

Bennett fought to control his anger.

“Everyone who's alive is coming with me,” Bennett shot back. “If you've got a problem with that, bring it up with the president. I'm taking these guys home.”

Air Force One shot across the Atlantic at 43,000 feet.

Among those aboard were Defense Secretary Burt Trainor, Deputy Secretary of State Dick Cavanaugh, Press Secretary Chuck Murray and a cadre of senior officials from the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department Policy Planning Staff. Those who weren't working were sleeping or watching the in-flight movie system. Events on the ground were moving fast, and word of what had just happened in Gaza would reach the president any moment. But it hadn't yet.

MacPherson sat alone in his airborne office, sipping a cup of coffee and reviewing the latest intel from Iraq. The Persian Gulf port city of Umm Qasr was controlled by the marines. Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) commandos were almost finished clearing mines from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Basrah and Nasiriyah were largely secured by army units in the south, as were Mosul and Kirkuk in the north. There were still sporadic skirmishes in Karbala and Al Kut. Holdouts from the Republican Guard were booby-trapping cars and fedayeen snipers took potshots at night. But that was to be expected. He had no doubt the entire country would soon be secure.

All things considered, civilian casualties in Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein and Saladin—Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem in
A.D.
1187—were much lower than he'd feared.

Baghdad was not so lucky. American spy satellites had found the “smoking gun” the world had been demanding. Saddam had been minutes away from launching a nuclear ICBM—code-named The Last Jihad—against New York or Washington, or perhaps Israel or Saudi Arabia. His nuclear forces had been hidden in a children's hospital in the heart of the city, not far from Baghdad University. The president didn't have a choice. It was kill or be killed.

MacPherson knew he'd done the right thing. But that didn't make it easier to sleep at night. It didn't make it easier to see the latest bomb-damage assessments, or read the latest intelligence updates, or listen to Paris, Bonn, and Moscow denounce him at the U.N. This was the price of being the world's only superpower, and it was high indeed.

 

Banacci was a Ranger.

He couldn't bear the thought of leaving behind the bodies of his fallen comrades. And as a senior DSS agent and team leader, he was supposed to take over after Mancuso. But Bennett was right. There were bigger fish to fry here and they didn't need to be fighting each other. Banacci needed to get the president's “point man” out of this hellhole and back to Washington. His job was to provide security for Snapshot and its occupants, so that's what he'd do, like it or not.

“Fine, hold on,”
he shouted into his microphone.
“We'll give you guys cover.”

Banacci cranked up the air conditioning and directed the team in the Suburban ahead of him—code-named Halfback—to take the point. His Suburban—Fullback—would bring up the rear. Agents in both vehicles locked their doors, popped in new ammo clips, and sucked down bottles of water.

McCoy scrambled into the front passenger seat, next to Bennett. She pulled out a map and quickly tried to assess their options, navigating a way of escape. Bennett looked in his rearview mirror.
What was this guy waiting for?

Bennett gunned the engine. He was determined to get his team out alive. But if Galishnikov or Sa'id asked him what their chances were, he'd be tempted to lie. Yes, he'd raced his Porsche turbo down hairpin turns in the Colorado Rockies on weekends. He'd floored it on country straightaways in Connecticut. But he'd never been trained by the CIA's school for defensive driving, or the Secret Service's. And yes, he'd reviewed some maps and logistics on the flight from Washington. But he didn't really know where he was. He hadn't driven this team into Gaza. And he knew one wrong turn was a death sentence.

Maybe he should have let McCoy take the wheel, but things were happening so fast. They'd be moving in a second—they'd be moving
now
if Bennett were leading. He couldn't say it out loud. He could barely say it to himself. But the fact was that even a bulletproof, armor-plated limousine wouldn't be enough if they were stopped and surrounded. Eventually, the mob would break in, the four of them would be yanked out, and, if history were any guide…it was a thought he couldn't finish.

 

Yuri Gogolov held the satellite remote in his hand.

He was transfixed by the coverage from Gaza. He was watching on four different television sets, while checking the latest updates from AP, Reuters, and Agence France Presse on a laptop. The images of fire and death were mesmerizing. Thus far, the operation was going far better than expected. But these were just the first, early minutes. The world had no idea what still lay in store.

 

MacPherson's thoughts turned to his own Judas Iscariot.

Stuart Morris Iverson—held in isolation under a twenty-four-hour-a-day suicide watch at a federal maximum-security prison—wasn't talking. He refused to cooperate unless the Justice Department—and the president himself—promised to take the death penalty off the table. The man wasn't asking for a pardon, or immunity. He knew such inducements were out of the question. He was simply negotiating for his life, and he was a world-class negotiator.

Unless MacPherson spared his life, Iverson—the man who'd served as president and CEO of the Joshua Fund and GSX, who'd served as the national chairman of then-governor MacPherson's campaign to succeed George W. Bush as the forty-fourth president of the United States, who'd been approved by the Senate ninety-eight to nothing to become MacPherson's Treasury Secretary—would simply refuse to talk. He'd refuse to divulge what he knew about a terrorist conspiracy whose tentacles reached from Moscow to Tehran. He'd refuse to tell the FBI the inside story of Yuri Gogolov—the shadowy Russian ultranationalist—or his Iranian operations chief, Mohammed Jibril.

FBI Director Scott Harris and Attorney General Neil Wittimore didn't care. The case against Iverson was solid. They didn't need a plea bargain. They needed to fire a shot heard round the world. The president had to send the world a message: terrorists would be hunted down and brought to a final justice. To send Stuart Iverson, a personal friend of the president, into the gas chamber—or order him to receive a lethal injection—would do just that. Yet to show even the slightest bit of leniency—especially with Iverson—would be devastating to the country's war-on-terror efforts, Harris argued. It was a compelling case, even to a president who could generally be described as willing but ill at ease with enforcing the death penalty.

“Mr. President, you've got an urgent call from the Sit Room.”

Was there any other kind?

The president looked up from his reading.

“Which line?” he asked.

“Line three, sir.”

MacPherson picked up the phone and found his National Security advisor on the line. Marsha Kirkpatrick quickly briefed the president on the crisis in Gaza. She explained that Bennett and his team were pinned down, and a torrential electrical storm made it impossible to send in a rescue team by air—not yet anyway.

MacPherson tried not to betray the emotions suddenly forcing their way to the surface. But it wasn't easy, and for a few moments, the line was silent. He was numb. He'd never even considered the possibility of Arafat being assassinated. Certainly not by a fellow Palestinian. And certainly not by Arafat's own personal security chief. It was unthinkable. Abu Mazen, maybe. Mazen didn't have Arafat's stature in Palestine, much less throughout the Arab world. He might never develop it. But Arafat
was
Palestine. He was the face, the voice, the spirit of the Palestinian revolution.

Most of MacPherson's top advisors considered Arafat a major obstacle to peace. Jack Mitchell's guys at the CIA were adamant that MacPherson should refuse to even acknowledge Arafat's presence or give him a role. The Clinton team had courted Arafat aggressively, constantly inviting him to the White House. But what had they gained? The most violent phase of the Palestinian intifada began during the Clinton years. So did the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And the evidence was compelling—the vast majority of those suicide bombings (Mitchell called them “homicide bombings” to put the emphasis on the fact that their purpose was murder, not self-sacrifice) were encouraged, paid for, and/or explicitly or tacitly approved of by Arafat and his henchmen.

The Bush team had reversed course. They'd refused to deal with Arafat directly. They'd isolated him internationally. They'd given Israel the green light to invade the West Bank and Gaza and rip up Saudi-and Iranian-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist cells. And they'd pressured Arafat and the Palestinian Legislative Council to appoint Abu Mazen as a new, “moderate” prime minister, someone who the United States, the West, and Israel just might be able to deal with over time.

Everyone knew the Islamic radicals felt threatened by Mazen's rise to power and by even the slightest prospect that Arafat and Mazen might consider accepting the new American peace plan. But could anyone have predicted this level of carnage? MacPherson began to reconsider his own strategy. He'd tried to combine Clinton's willingness to deal with Arafat with Bush's insistence on dealing with Abu Mazen. Had he moved too fast? Had he pushed too hard?

 

They made a good team, thought Bennett.

McCoy was smart and gutsy and she had great instincts. Based in the GSX London office—overlooking the Thames and the British Parliament—at one point she'd been jetting back and forth across “the pond” several times a week, a Virgin Atlantic preferred customer. She'd often met with Bennett in New York or the Denver headquarters until the wee hours of the morning, mapping out strategies, crunching numbers, debating best-and worst-case scenarios. The two had traveled all over the world together during the last eight months—Davos, Paris, Tokyo, Cairo, Riyadh, and Jerusalem, to name a few—always business, never personal.

McCoy had earned his trust over the past few years, not an easy thing to do, and he'd twice promoted her. When he'd hired her, he'd known she was the best-qualified woman who had applied, and the best looking. She had an economics degree from UNC Chapel Hill, an MBA from Wharton, and a license to make money from the Securities and Exchange Commission. What he hadn't known was that she also had a license to kill from the CIA. She'd worked for Bennett for almost three years, but only in the last month had he discovered who she really was—a mole in his operation, planted by the president and the director of Central Intelligence to watch his back and clear him for government service. Any way you sliced it, she was a mystery, and the longer Bennett knew her, the more he wanted to figure her out.

McCoy adjusted her earpiece and buckled her seat belt. She still couldn't get a bead on what was happening. The mobs on the streets now couldn't be the “silent Palestinian majority.” These couldn't be people who Ibrahim Sa'id claimed were exhausted by the intifada, longing for peace and willing to accept a two-state solution with Israel for the sake of their children and grandchildren.

These had to be “Mohammed's mobs,” drawn from a small but highly radicalized subsection of Palestinian society who saw themselves as hard-core Islamic loyalists. They despised Israel
and
were deeply committed to jihad, a “holy war” against the “Zionist infidels” and their conspirators from the “Great Satan” known as America. They weren't the vast majority of Palestinians. They weren't even a plurality. They weren't “nominal” Muslims. They were true believers, and—though she'd never admit it to anyone in this car—what they believed terrified McCoy.

They were “Islamists,” and during America's long war on terror a lot had been learned about the financial, technical, and ideological links between the purists of Islam. The mob closing in on them now had bitterly fought in the streets and in the Palestinian Legislative Council for the imposition of the
shari'ah,
an Islamic legal system not unlike the one the Taliban had imposed on the poor souls of Afghanistan. Like the Taliban, they wanted a world where women couldn't be educated, couldn't work, couldn't show their face. A world where women couldn't wear nail polish, couldn't smile or laugh in public, couldn't listen to Mozart. Indeed, they could be flogged or stoned or killed for trying. They wanted a world where children couldn't play with toys or dolls or watch
Sesame Street
or have birthday parties. They wanted a world where men ruled and ruled ruthlessly, just like the Taliban.

These were kindred spirits with the Iranian-funded Hezbollah of Lebanon. They'd been supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But wherever they lived or whatever they called themselves, the mission of the “Islamists” was the same—to conquer in the name of Mohammed. They'd danced in the streets when the Ayatollah Khomeini led the Islamic revolution in Iran and took Americans hostage for 444 days. They'd danced in the streets when Osama bin Laden and the Saudi-funded Al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. And in the subsequent U.S. war in Afghanistan, they'd joyfully sided with their “Muslim brothers” in the Taliban.

One Reuters headline McCoy had come across before leaving Washington now came flashing back: “Hamas Backs Taliban, Urges Muslim Unity.” The article was dated September 14, 2001, just three days after the terrorist attacks that left three thousand Americans dead. Cited prominently in the story, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi of Hamas couldn't have been more clear. “I join the cause for Muslims to be united in order to deter the United States from launching war against Muslims in Afghanistan,” al-Rantissi said proudly. “It is impossible for Muslims to stand handcuffed and blindfolded while other Muslims, their brothers, are being attacked. The Muslim world should stand up against the American threats which are fed by the Jews.”