The Last Jihad (19 page)

“Julie and I have known little Erin—well, not so little anymore—since, gosh, since before she was born. Julie even threw a baby shower for Janet at our old house in Cherry Creek way back, I don’t know, whenever that was.”

“I loved that house,” said McCoy, staring into the fire.

“Me, too,” said the president. “Me, too.”

IDF Unit 212—
Sayeret Maglan
—is one of Israel’s most highly trained and secretive special forces teams.

Three of its pilots and eight special ops commandos were already in place. The two American-built AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships and accompanying Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopter were already fully powered and ready for takeoff.

The largely underground and ultra-top-secret air base in the Negev desert was on full alert. So by the time Captain Yarkon burst out of the command center door with his orders, his team was ready to move. Yarkon jumped into the back of the Sikorsky and gave the thumbs-up sign. Within moments, the whole package had lifted off and disappeared without a trace.

Flying without lights, without radio communications, and flying low—at times just fifty feet above the desert blurring below them—would be terrifying to most men. But not to Unit 212. They had practiced such operations in the dark, foreboding, shadowy mountains and
wadis
of the Negev for years and they were confident.

In a certain sense, in fact, the three pilots weren’t piloting at all. They were just monitoring the computer as it did most of the work. The Israelis, after all, have nearly perfected the art of flying by autopilot and precisely for such a time as this.

Every few months—at night—the IDF secretly flies highly sophisticated computerized drones—essentially tiny unmanned reconnaissance planes—across their borders at incredibly low levels and steer them by remote control to predetermined rendezvous points inside hostile countries.

The drones gather a wealth of data every inch of the way. They videotape the entire journey with night-vision equipment so IDF pilots can later watch and re-watch and re-watch again the very routes they may one day fly. The strategy allows the pilots to learn every crack and crevice and rock and boulder and tree and snake they will encounter along the way, until they can fly such routes with their eyes closed or in their sleep. Just as important, the drones record every ascent, every descent, every turn, and every increase and decrease in air speed.

The data are then washed through IDF computers and recalculated to account for the differing weights and response times of other IDF aircraft, all of which are heavier and “stiffer” than the tiny drones. What spits out on the other side are highly classified CDs that can precisely replay the “musical score” of a trip across enemy lines to certain preselected destinations. These CDs can then be loaded at a moment’s notice into an aircraft’s computers for a proprietary software program to read and replicate.

Tonight, all three superquiet Unit 212 choppers were flying by CD, across the Red Sea and through the rugged, unforgiving mountains of Saudi Arabia. And this was no exercise. This was the real thing.

Ali Kamal was ecstatic.

He’d found his destination not far from Highway 10, the shadowy base of a massive sand dune perhaps sixty feet high. He arrived on time, three minutes under the wire, but on time. And his team was moving quickly to get ready.

The first order of business was to unload the German camel. This was the most difficult, labor-intensive and time-consuming of their tasks. Nothing else mattered if it wasn’t done right. But Kamal wasn’t worried.

The average team took thirty-four minutes and eighteen seconds, followed by another four minutes and six seconds to complete their other procedures. The record had been set back in 1991—thirty-one minutes and twelve seconds.

Three days ago, Kamal’s team had done it in twenty-eight minutes, forty-seven seconds—a new record, and the reason they’d been selected by General Azziz for this very mission.

“Any word?” asked the prime minister.

He stepped back into the blastproof war-room bunker after making a series of phone calls to various Cabinet members from the bunker next door.

“Not yet, sir,” replied the defense minister, calmly sipping an icy glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “But don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

The seventy-six-year-old prime minister sat down, pulled out his reading glasses, and began glancing over the newly received intelligence reports from Washington, London and Paris. A nightmare was unfolding, and if the Americans didn’t or wouldn’t act, he just might have to.

Maybe it was the cold night air.

It was now the middle of the night in Iraq and the desert temperatures kept sinking. Maybe it was the fatigue of such a long day of driving from Baghdad. That had not been part of his team’s training and perhaps it should have been.

Maybe it was the fact that the new warheads they’d been given were significantly heavier than the ones they’d always used and trained on in the past. This seemed to have created an unusually high level of anxiety among his men, and they were taking extra time and moving too slowly.

Or maybe it was the fact that this was their first real mission and the stakes were so much higher. All of them had been too young during the previous Gulf War.

Whatever it was, they were finally done. But they would win no awards. It had taken them thirty-nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, a complete failure.

Ali Kamal raced back to his Range Rover and powered up his cell phone. Ten seconds later, he speed-dialed a phone number in Berlin. That was automatically forwarded to a phone number in Johannesburg, South Africa. From there it was forwarded to a phone number in Sao Paolo, Brazil. That was digitally forwarded to a number just outside of Moscow where it was forwarded to Tangiers, Morocco.

At that point, it was intercepted by Gibraltar Station—an “Echelon” listening post run by the U.S. National Security Agency on the British-controlled Rock of Gibraltar—on its way to the Iraqi Defense Ministry, where it was fed down into Saddam Hussein’s personal war room, deep under Baghdad.

“The letter is stamped and ready for the post office,” Kamal said in Farsi, though his native tongue was Arabic.

“Praise be to Allah,” responded the voice at the other end, also in Farsi. “Go ahead and mail the letter.”

Kamal quickly turned off the phone and threw it back in his precious Range Rover. All eyes were on him now and he gave his team his full attention, flashing them five fingers. They had five minutes to warm up their R-17
Al Hussein
rocket—a Soviet-designed ballistic missile known in the West as the Scud B—and wait for his signal to launch.

This was no humanitarian mission, and Kamal and his team didn’t work for the U.N. Indeed, they had murdered an entire U.N. relief team a few days earlier, dumped their bodies in a lake, and taken over their vehicles precisely for this moment.

Kamal and his top lieutenant scrambled up the sand dune to use their night-vision goggles and make sure all was clear. But they were hardly worried. Since the Gulf War, America and her allies had launched more than twenty-eight thousand air sorties over these deserts but had never found, much less destroyed, an Iraqi mobile missile launcher. How could they? Western Iraq alone was more than twenty-nine thousand square miles of raw, ugly desert. It would be easier to find a specific drop of water in the Indian Ocean than to find them, particularly at night.

Sure, the Americans and British found and destroyed a few fixed-site missile launchers. But not a single mobile launcher. Nor would they. Especially not one hidden inside an official U.N. food-and-medical transport. Especially not at night.

The young platoon leader couldn’t help but smile as he approached the top of the dune, even though his eyes and face were now completely covered with sand and stinging horribly. Maybe he would be personally given a medal of honor by President Hussein himself.

A shudder of excitement rippled through his body. He looked back once more to see his lieutenant about twenty yards behind him, taking a swig from a canteen of water and trying to get the sand out of his mouth. He looked down below and saw his team lit up by the headlights of their Range Rovers. They gave him the “go” sign. The missile was ready. They were ready. Let history begin.

Kamal adjusted his night-vision goggles and fell flat on his stomach against the dune. He carefully inched his way to the top, just five feet away. On the other side would be the Jordan Valley, Jordan herself, Palestine, Israel, and the sea. His heart raced with joy and pride.

And then he heard it.

Kamal carefully peaked his head up over the dune and turned on his goggles.

The shock of what he saw froze him in place.

Had he been standing, his head would have been chopped clean off by the Israeli Apache now slicing the air just a few feet above him.

Kamal instinctively ducked, looked down at his team and tried to scream. But he couldn’t. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. No one could have ever heard him over the roar of the chopper. He could see the blank expressions on the faces of his team. It wasn’t fear. It was total disbelief. And now it was death.

The Apache’s 30mm guns began blazing away. Fire and smoke poured out of them as tracer bullets shredded his men into tiny bits of bloody vapor. Two laser-guided Hellfire missiles penetrated his precious Range Rover and the one beside it, causing both to erupt in a massive fireball that left Kamal screaming and writhing in pain and trying desperately to remove the night-vision goggles from his eyes.

Another Apache suddenly emerged out of nowhere. Two more Hellfire missiles exploded in two more Range Rovers. Then two more missiles struck the Daimler-Benz truck and it, too, exploded in a deafening fireball, fed by hundreds of gallons of reserve diesel fuel.

With every man on Kamal’s team dead or dying, the Sikorsky quickly landed nearby and eight Israeli commandos and Captain Jonah Yarkon burst out the side door and moved to secure the Scud missile and remove its warhead. Kamal was still screaming in pain, but none of the commandos could hear him over the on-going explosions and the roar of three choppers.

Kamal tried blindly to reach for his side arm, but it was then that the lead Apache pilot whirled his chopper around—constantly looking for an enemy—and saw the twenty-six-year-old leader thrashing about wildly on the sand dune.

With a flick of a switch and a press of his thumb, the IDF pilot put Ali Kamal out of his misery, though he seriously doubted the man was now in the arms of seventy virgins in paradise.

The two Apaches moved away, enlarging the perimeter of security for the commandos and switching on their high-powered radar to see if there were any other mobile Scud launchers—or aircraft—in the vicinity. But they saw nothing. All was clear.

Six minutes later, the commandos—each wearing hazmat clothing and protective goggles, headgear, and gloves—had the warhead detached from the rest of the missile, secure in a heavily insulated and hermetically sealed safe box, and piled back into the Sikorsky.

The chopper lifted off, joined the Apaches and began their race back home, leaving timed explosive charges to detonate and destroy the rest of the Scud B rocket and its launcher just seconds after the Israeli strike force had cleared the area.

“The snow cone is on ice,” said Captain Yarkon into a digitally encrypted radiotelephone, his only communication of the night.

Now the question was: What flavor was the snow cone?

The train ride from Vienna to Moscow normally takes about fifty-two hours.

But it is more than merely a slow, plodding, and quiet journey through snow-covered fields and hamlets and villages and the Carpathian Mountains. It is a journey back through the heart of darkness.

With a glass mug of hot Russian
chai
in your cold hands and some warm black bread and a plate of steaming
kashka-varnishka
, you can sit at the small table in your sleeping car and play cards and smoke cigarettes, or get lost in a novel, or just stare up at the ceiling and think about nothing or everything or a little bit of both. But if you care to peek out through the smudgy, filthy windows of your claustrophobic compartment, you will find a sad and war-weary land, scarred by German occupation and Soviet suffocation.

You will snake your way through Bratislava, the poor but proud capital of Slovakia, a city of trade and learning and history, born of Romans and Celts and eventually settled by Slavs in the eighth century and now almost half a million people strong.

It was here that a good peace was once found when Napoleon and Francis II signed the Treaty of Pressburg in 1805, following the Battle of Austerlitz.

Yet it was here, too, that a great rescue was once narrowly and tragically lost. In 1942, the Nazis—perhaps cynically, perhaps not—offered a rabbi named Weissmandl and a woman named Gisi Fleischmann a deal to trade one million imprisoned Jews headed for the gas chambers for two million dollars. But the rabbi and Fleischmann and their colleagues couldn’t persuade anyone in the West to come up with the cash. It may have been the West’s callous indifference. It may have been the fear that the Germans would renege on the deal and use the money to help defeat the Allies. It may have been something else entirely. But the money never came in, and a million souls never came out.

Along your journey to Moscow, you will also wind your way through Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine. With its sprawling open-air market and crumbling Russian Orthodox churches that barely survived the age of atheism, Lviv can seem like a city somehow trapped in a time gone by.

In warmer weather, in genuinely lovely, tree-lined parks,
babushkas
play with their grandchildren. Young mothers stroll their infants. Old men play chess and dominoes. There is a sense of family and faith that have been the glue holding this seven-century-old society together. But the fashions are drab and colorless and seem right out of the American ’30s. The cars and trucks are old and styleless, like a black-and-white scene from Mayberry. The storefronts are simple and unattractive—no neon, little advertising, few brand names, just signs like “Bakery” and “Drugstore” and “Butcher,” though the racks are sparse and the cupboards nearly bare.

Somehow, the whole city has the feel of a Hollywood back lot amidst the filming of a Depression-era period piece. And Lviv, too, like most cities and towns in the region, has a sad story and a wounded spirit.

It, too, was occupied by the Nazis, from 1941 through 1944. It, too, saw thousands of Jews rounded up into concentration camps, wherein the S.S. and the Gestapo proceeded to murder nearly the entire Jewish population. And as if that weren’t enough, the Soviet Red Army then rolled in to “liberate” the city for Communism, killing, maiming and enslaving the already traumatized citizens and plunging everyone into a new war, a Cold War, a new age of ghettos and gulags. So often has the city been in different hands that it actually has four different names—Lviv in Ukrainian, Lvov in Russian, Lvuv in Polish, and Limberg in German.

Eventually, your journey by train will bring you to the end of German-and Soviet-ravaged Ukraine and you will arrive at the Russian border, and a huge guard tower, barbed-wire fences and searchlights will welcome you. A few dozen soldiers, all wearing green wool uniforms and green caps with red bands and gold badges around them, toting machine guns and walking German shepherds, look like a scene straight out of
All’s Quiet on the Western Front
.

The soldiers step aboard the train to check passports and visas, as well as to check every compartment from top to bottom and every passenger from head to toe, and even the engines and wiring underneath the cars, looking for contraband and drugs and guns and bombs and more recently for anthrax and other weapons
du jour.

Satisfied that all is well, the soldiers direct everyone to a fairly large customs building across the border, hot and stuffy and crowded. It is the last chance to buy a newspaper and make a phone call, get some food and drinks and use a slightly cleaner bathroom, though “cleaner” is a distinctly relative term in Russia. Then, eventually, it is time to board the train once again and cross the three hundred or so kilometers of the great, Russian “bread basket” to the capital on the turbid Moskva River.

What’s different about entering Russia by rail rather than by air is the remarkably lax security at the borders in the post–Cold War era, a loophole the “four horsemen” now exploited with a vengeance.

Soviet borders were once impenetrable. Russian borders are now Swiss cheese.

Traveling through airports East or West meant traveling past video cameras and high-tech surveillance equipment such as state-of-the-art facial recognition software, and counterterrorism experts on a heightened state of alert, painstakingly checking passengers against watch lists developed by the FBI, FSB, and Interpol, updated daily, sometimes hourly. But slipping incognito across distant Russian borders spanning eleven time zones, manned by ill-clothed and poorly paid soldiers more interested in getting drunk than monitoring every loser who couldn’t afford to fly into Moscow, was fairly easy.

Getting weapons into the country wasn’t easy. But getting people trained and willing to use them was, and the country had more than enough weapons within its borders to get the job done, and that’s all that really mattered.

After all, the Russian Federation comprised nearly eleven million square miles of territory, almost twice the size of the U.S. And in a time of near famine and starvation, few if any of the nearly one hundred and fifty million citizens cared to think much about who wanted to get
into
their country, at least by car, truck or train. Most, instead, thought several times a day about how to afford getting
out
. And this was one of those days.

“Mr. President, we need to move you immediately,” said Agent Sanchez.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Checkmate’s on the phone. He’s got the NSC team in place and events are moving rapidly,” answered Sanchez as she and the other agents maneuvered his wheelchair out of the commander’s private office and into the adjoining conference room. Corsetti, Iverson, and Black were already waiting for them, as was General David Schwartz, the NORAD commander.

“Bennett, McCoy, get your butts in here,” shouted the president as Sanchez positioned him behind the oak table at the head of the room.

All evidence of a Thanksgiving meal was long gone. Instead, all the previously plain and unadorned walls were lowering to reveal video screens, computer monitors, and a high-tech THREATCON map of the world, the likes of which Bennett had never seen before. Even the top of the conference table was rapidly removed by NORAD staff to reveal four banks of secure phones—one for each side of the table—and networked laptops allowing each person to simultaneously read real-time threat condition information and type each other instant messages without having to speak out loud if they were in the middle of a conference call.

Bennett glanced up at the wall over the major video screen to the twelve digital clocks, one from every major time zone. It was now 7:13
P.M.
at NORAD—9:13
P.M.
in Washington, 4:13
A.M.
the next morning in Jerusalem.

“This is amazing,” whispered Bennett to McCoy as the two got seated next to Black. “You ever see anything like it?”

“Where do you think I got the idea for our little war room in London?” McCoy whispered back.

Bennett just looked at her for a moment.

“I just thought you’d watched too many James Bond movies.”

Everyone was ready.

Except for the president and Secretary Iverson, the entire National Security Council was physically gathered and assembled in the President’s Emergency Operations Center underneath the White House. Present and accounted for were the vice president; National Security Advisor Marsha Kirkpatrick; Defense Secretary Burt Trainor; Secretary of State Tucker Paine; CIA Director Jack Mitchell; Attorney General Neil Wittimore; four-star General Ed Mutschler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and a top aide for each. Unlike the Counter-Terrorism Task Force, the FBI and Secret Service Directors were not present, but both were on standby in their offices.

The vice president began immediately.

“Mr. President, first of all, how are you?”

“Fine. You’ve all got my medical summary?”

“We did, sir. Chuck wants to know if we should release it to the media?”

“Absolutely. People need to know the facts if they’re going to understand exactly how hard we’re about to hit back. Marsha, you there?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kirkpatrick.

“Call Marcus Jackson at the
Times
. Give him a briefing on my condition and a copy of the summary exclusively—on background—as a ‘high-level government source.’ I want it to look a deliberate, calculated leak, a message to the world that we regard these terrorist attacks as a prelude to war.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Make sure Jackson has the story and it’s big, front-page news. The
Times
puts it up on the Web around midnight your time. The moment the story goes up on the Web, have Chuck page the White House press corps staying over at Peterson and alert them he’ll do a full background briefing at four
A.M.
—six Eastern. I want every TV morning show, plus radio, talking tomorrow morning about how serious the president’s condition really is and that high-level government sources say a massive retaliation is coming.”

“Sir, this is Tucker.”

“Yes, Tuck.”

“Is that really wise? We need to be careful not to inflame the situation.”

“Mr. Secretary, can you see me? Am I on your video screen right now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then with all due respect, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Sir—sir, we cannot make this personal. This is not about you, sir.”

“No, you’re right, Tucker,” the president replied, making an extra effort, Bennett could see, to remain calm. “It’s not about me. It’s about the American presidency. It’s about the security of our government, and our people. It’s about the British royal family. It’s about the Canadian prime minister. It’s about the royal family of Saudi Arabia.”

“My point, sir, is…”

“I know what you’re saying, Tucker. And I couldn’t disagree more. We are not inflaming the situation, Mr. Secretary. The situation is inflamed. We’re simply responding to a war that has been forced upon us. And make no mistake about it: this is war. We are at war. It’s not a war on terrorism anymore. It’s a war against the country or countries that did this. We are going to strike. And we’re going to strike hard. Am I clear?”

Everyone but the Secretary of State nodded quietly.

Tucker Paine looked like he’d just been punched in the stomach. He was mortified at the way he’d just been dismissed by the president. But he didn’t dare walk out. In his judgment, things were disintegrating rapidly now. Cooler heads were not prevailing. Emotion was winning the day.

“Now Jack, what’ve you got?” the president continued.

Kirkpatrick slipped out of the room for a moment to call Marcus Jackson with the
New York Times
in Colorado.

“Sir, we at CIA are now convinced that the events of the past thirty-six hours are not acts of terrorism,” said Mitchell. “They are, in fact, acts of war.”

The CIA Director had everyone’s undivided attention, and he began methodically going through the evidence his team had gathered.

“In the past thirty-six hours, the Iraqis have shot down three of our reconnaissance planes. They’re readying several mechanized units. They’re readying their Republican Guard forces. They’re sending recon units to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. They’ve put their bombers on standby. The streets of Baghdad are like a ghost town. No car or truck has left the city—except for a U.N. relief team headed back to Jordan—in the past twelve hours. And Saddam just delivered a real humdinger of a speech. Allow me to quote: ‘My Arab brothers. If we cannot recapture the glory of Palestine from the river to the sea, and from the sea to the river, with its crown
Al-Quds
, then we shall erase the Zionist invaders from the face of the earth. We will make the blood of the criminal Zionist invaders and occupiers run cold, then cease to run at all. I have no intention but to do whatever pleases Allah and bestows glory onto our Arab Nation. Allah will not disappoint the Arab Nation, and we will triumph. Allah is the Greatest…Allah is the Greatest…Allah is the Greatest…Let the imperialist and Zionist enemies of our Nation be debased…May Allah damn the Jews.’ End quote.”

“Jack, you’re sure about that translation?”

“Absolutely, sir. Just got it from NSA. The scary thing is that the language is almost exactly the same as Saddam has used in speeches to the Arab League in the past. The critical difference my guys point out is that in the past, Saddam talked about ‘liberating’ Palestine. Now he’s talking about ‘erasing’ Zionism from the ‘face of the planet.’”

“And?”

“Well, sir, we’re not quite sure yet. We need more time to analyze it. But there’s no question Saddam’s rhetoric is hotter than it’s ever been. He seems to be getting an itchy trigger finger. That’s not good. And the fear my team has is that Saddam is becoming desperate and irrational.”