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  He picked up Mustapha’s rifle and hurled it with all of his force, far into the heather. Then he began his mile-long walk across the moor, in the rain, back to the hotel, where he would change, shower, and get into dry clothes.

  He would check in with Russ Makin and leave cash in an envelope in the room to pay the bill. He would then head south, back to the iron-security of the SAS base, where he could regroup in peace and quiet. Mack presumed Russ would have the SAS clean up those bodies long before anyone else realized they were even dead.

  And only a few locals had heard the steady beat of the helicopter’s rotors when four SAS men landed on the moor two hours later and efficiently removed the three dead Afghanis.

  SHEIKH ABDULLAH was still walking around free, thanks mainly to an instinct for survival that, in modern times, ranked second only to that of the impeached U.S. President Bill Clinton. And right now he had but one thing on his mind. He had to get Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu the hell out of the UK before they all ended up in the slammer, himself included.

  Dr. Kamil had driven them back to Darsfield Street and had agreed to remain with them, for his usual astronomical fee. But the Sheikh was unnerved by the entire set of circumstances. He already sensed there was big trouble out on Ilkley Moor, and that the Americans were in league with the British government in their determination to eliminate the Chosen Ones, the Holy Warriors of Allah. He had to get them away, in the obvious interests of both Allah and The Prophet. But even more significantly in the interests of the blood brothers of al-Qaeda, the disciples of bin Laden.

  He guessed it would be a matter of hours before the West Yorkshire Police came up with another reason to arrest Ibrahim and his men. And he decided to move immediately. He picked up the phone and instructed Dr. Kamil to drive them out to Leeds-Bradford airport, where the chartered aircraft from Air Iran was waiting.

  The Sheikh, dressed now in Western clothes, would meet them there and supervise their exit from Great Britain. “Tell them to bring passports, visas, and all other documents,” he said. “They cannot stay here.”

  Before he left he called his main contact at Air Iran in Tehran, and deposited the problem with him—the problem being, of course, what to do with the Chosen Ones and how to find a place for them to land in another country, any country, except the UK.

  When he arrived at the airport he was met by an Air Iran official who informed him they could take off immediately. The four passengers were on board, and Dr. Kamil had left for Manchester.

  The sixteen-seater turbo-jet was fueled and ready, and the Ayatollah in Tehran, with whom the official had consulted, had arranged for the flight to go into Alcolea, a rural Spanish airstrip outside the picturesque Andalusian city of Cordoba. There they would be transported to a Muslim safehouse in the city at first light.

  This pleased the Bradford imam immensely. Spain was becoming increasingly important to Europe’s network of Islamic extremists, and nowhere was more important than Cordoba, with its Great Mosque, which had been turned into a Cathedral in 1492, when five hundred years of Muslim rule in Spain had ended. But it was still one of the largest mosques in the world, with nineteen aisles, eight hundred and fifty red-and-white striped Moorish arches, and epic Muslim simplicity.

  For centuries it had been neither one nor the other. And periodic uproars were apt to break out over the ban on mass Muslim prayer meetings. The massive mosque/cathedral had two warring hearts, with Spain’s one million Muslims seized by romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of al-Andaluca, and the Caliphate that had ruled the country for so long.

  It was the perfect situation to breed resentment, indignation, anger, and that brand of religious loathing that sits so easily upon the shoulders of the Islamic faithful. There are hundreds of mosques in Spain, and many of the population, not to mention the Catholic bishops, believe they are funded by undemocratic countries promoting radical Islam, particularly Saudi Arabia.

  They cite the undeniable truth that the Pope was permitted to make an act of prayer at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, which is open to Christian worshippers. And, in apparent exasperation at the obdurate attitude of the Catholic clergy, there were now plans to build a completely new half-size replica of the Cordoba Great Mosque.

  The Islamic intention was for the new structure to stand as a site for Islamic pilgrimages from all over the world. And this truly alarmed Spain’s bishops, who resolutely opposed any such building being constructed in the former heart of the ancient Islamic Kingdom. Opponents of the mosque swear by all that’s holy the bombing of the Madrid Railroad Station in March 2003, in which 191 people were killed, had lines of evidence, and overtones of hatred, leading directly to Cordoba.

  Twenty-nine Islamists were charged over the railroad massacre, and most of them were found guilty, with two of them creating such a spectacularly bad impression on the judge, he sent them to prison for a combined total of forty thousand years.

  The very word “Cordoba,” with its new modern revolutionary connotations, made Sheikh Abdullah’s heart sing. And he waited to see the Iran Air charter take off, over the Yorkshire moors, heading south, before he returned to his office in the basement of the mosque. It was almost midnight when he arrived, and a little after midnight when his cell phone rang, the numbers on the caller ID indicating Peshawar, Pakistan, where it was 5 a.m.

  He knew immediately the caller was Shakir Khan. The Sheikh waited for his voicemail to pick up, and then pressed the button to retrieve the message, spoken by a female, “The four sons of Allah have been blessed by the Ayatollah and taken into his care. The path to Satan leads to the mezquita where The Prophet slew Janus, then to MCM in Avenue Colonia del Valle.”

  For a quasi-military signal plainly packed with information, that one moved quickly. Not, however, quickly enough. The British Pashto signals expert Shane Collins was again at his post listening. And once more he was onto the unusual aspects of this call. Again, he needed a more accurate translation, and in moments, he had it.

  He already knew the call, made on a cell phone, had come from somewhere fifty miles west of Peshawar, somewhere in Afghanistan. He now flashed a signal through to a second British listening post in the UK to retrace and track the line on the frequency. In minutes, it came back and revealed that the line bisected the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, which was all too familiar.

  He called over his supervisor and reported his immediate findings, confirming this had many of the hallmarks of a previous coded call from the Hindu Kush. The young British captain agreed, and sent a report into GCHQ Cheltenham, England.

  They ran their tests, confirmed Sergeant Collins’s findings, and relayed the full report directly to Captain Ramshawe.

  Once more, Shakir Khan had been badly intercepted.

  SHEIKH ABDULLAH BAZIR, in common with almost every senior Islamic cleric in the world, was a man of great learning. And like Ayatollah Khomeini, Sheikh Abdullah, had studied for fifteen years in the sacred Shi’ite city of Qom, home of the gold-domed Astane shrine. As a theologian he was first-rate, steeped in the extraordinary history of his religion, familiar with the rules and nuances, the teaching and the taboos. He could not put his followers directly in touch with Allah, but he could show them the path, teach them how to beseech the one and only God to hear their prayers, and to guide them in His holy and righteous ways.

  But for all his education and training, Sheikh Abdullah was unaware the Brits were on to him as he deciphered the signal.The path to Satan leads to the mezquita where The Prophet slew Janus. . . . Mezquita is Spanish for mosque, and “Janus” shot the word “Cordoba”’ right to the front of his brain. Every Muslim cleric knew the legend of the Cordoba Mosque, when the Moorish conquistadors in 785 AD discovered the sacred site of the temple of the two-headed Roman God, Janus, in Cordoba, and had slammed the gigantic edifice of the Great Mosque right on the spot where Janus had once occupied prime position, which was a very major deal in those days.

  Therefore, there was no doubt in She
ikh Abdullah’s mind. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu were heading due south, straight for Andalusia, and the safety of the Islamic embrace in the radical heart of restless Cordoba.

  Then to MCM in Avenue Colonia del Valle. The rest of the signal was crystalline clear. For years Muslim clerics in Europe, North Africa, and the Far East had tacitly supported the stop-go growth of their religion in Mexico because everything there was right for them. Mexico was metaphorically begging for the dawa, conversion, owing to its current situation of mass poverty, waning Christian religion, and a rebellious heart second to none in the Free World.

  Aside from Islam, the great revolutionary surge in Mexico was the rise of the Zapatistas, named for the great revolutionary leader Emilio Zapata, the National Army of Liberation. Based in the jungle wilds of Chiapa, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state, the Zapatistas represent a severe cultural unrest and an open door for a Muslim dawa.

  Mexicans had for centuries leaned on the Catholic church for religious comfort, but there was too much prosperity for the Americans, and too little for them, and millions of Mexican peasants were ready for the dawa.

  They were so poor and disorganized, there was a time when the Pakistani ambassador to Mexico allowed converted Muslims to use a prayer room at the Mexico City embassy on Hegel Street, since they had nowhere else to go. But then, in the late 1990s, a serious Islamic organization was founded, the Muslim Center of Mexico, which rapidly expanded to build mosques, libraries, and classrooms in fifteen Mexican cities, the most beautiful complex being, unsurprisingly, in the Pacific coastal region of Chiapa.

  Every Islamic cleric knew of the rise of Allah in Mexico. They all knew the surge of interest, the hundreds of daily conversions taking place, the brilliant success visiting Muslim clerics had in summoning the poor and the helpless to the Koran.

  The Muslim Center of Mexico was possibly the fastest growing Islamic study center on earth—a kind of sprawling controversial Madrassah, the Islamic Religious School system. The Center is known throughout Islam as the MCM, headquartered at Avenue Colonia del Valle in the Mexican Federal District.

  So Sheikh Abdullah understood precisely what was going on, that the Chosen Ones would enter the United States through Mexico. At evening prayers, he thanked his God for delivering them and for setting them on a safe and correct path to set in motion the longed-for follow up to the Day of Glory, September 2001.

  CAPTAIN RAMSHAWE could not for the life of him wrap his mind around the slain Janus. He punched the name into Google, and came up with the double-headed Roman God of Gateways who was able to look both backward and forward at the same time. “Two faced bastard,” he muttered to himself. But he still couldn’t make the connection. The Romans, in his mind at least, had been around at the time of Christ, whereas The Prophet, whom he assumed to be Mohammed, did not get going until six hundred years later. So how the hell did the Prophet nail this bloke with the two heads? Jimmy put that aside for a moment to look up the MCM in the Avenue Colonia, and found about ten thousand Avenue Colonias all over the Spanish-speaking world. And the MCM reference was impossible; his search had turned up an electronics company, then a brand of upmarket handbags, then music. The list was disparate and endless.

  Meanwhile the Chosen Ones were heading for the southern coast of England, flying low-level at around 10,000 feet. There was nothing to eat on board, and it was touch and go whether they would need to stop and refuel somewhere over central Spain. The entire journey would be twelve hundred miles, much of it over the ocean. The charter would clear the French coast somewhere west of St. Malo, flying around fifty miles over Brittany’s Atlantic headland, before heading three hundred miles down the Bay of Biscay to a point west of Bilbao. From there it was a straight four-hundred-mile journey across Spain to Cordoba.

  At least three Sleeper Cells had been alerted in Cordoba, and there would be no shortage of help for the four terrorists once they landed.

  MACK BEDFORD had no idea what had gone wrong, but it seemed to him that there had been an information leak inside the police station, which had prevented the four Islamists from being delivered to the right place. As a result, he had been the hunted, rather than the hunter. And the four proposed victims had somehow gotten away. All bad news, since now his task was on hold, until they could be located again.

  He gunned the Jaguar through the night, racing back through Lancashire, and heading south through Cheshire and Shropshire to Hereford.

  Lieutenant Colonel Makin was pouring himself a medicinal Scotch and water, and wondering where the hell Mack Bedford was when the former SEAL showed up just after midnight demanding food, drink, shelter, and information. Russ Makin had an abundance of the first three, almost none of the latter. But both men were agreed it was imperative Mack leave the country right away. “Right now there’s no chance anyone will ever find out anything,” said Russ. “But we need not take chances. Those air-heads at West Yorkshire Police have a very dangerous spy right in the middle of their operation. And he blew our plans apart, left no clues. I spoke to that detective superintendent a half hour ago and he says they are conducting an investigation.”

  “I should think they fucking well would be,” said Mack, uncharitably. “I could have been killed out on that goddamed moor.”

  “You? Not likely,” replied Russ. “How many did you say there were, three?”

  “That’s all I saw.”

  “Were you scared.”

  “Well, no. Not really. But I knew I’d better stay sharp. Can I have a drink?”

  “I’m getting it, I’m getting it.”

  “No one gave a shit if I stopped a round of Kalashnikov bullets—and I don’t suppose you give a shit if I die of thirst!”

  Russ handed him a long Scotch and soda. “I have a Navy Merlin helicopter picking you up at 0630, and taking you to RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall. There’s a freighter leaving from there, which will drop you off at Brunswick, Maine, on its way down to Norfolk.”

  “Outstanding,” replied Mack. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to fly commercial. Especially since I haven’t got a passport or any documents with me.”

  “Jesus. You’re more highly classified than even I thought,” said Russ. “My orders are to get you home without trace—no signs that you were ever here.”

  “That’s me,” said Mack, tipping back his drink. “The SEAL who never was.”

  IBRAHIM, YOUSAF, BEN, AND ABU remained in hiding for forty-eight hours and then made the two-hundred-mile car journey north to Madrid, crossing the three-hundred-mile range of the Sierra Morena Mountains and then Spain’s hot pine-and-oak miles of the central plateau.

  They reached Madrid’s Barajas Airport in time for Iberia’s nonstop flight to Mexico City leaving at 0120, using the same passports on which they had flown into England. The Spanish are routinely slack about checking people leaving the country, and not terribly exercised about those coming in.

  The flight took off on time, with the four terrorists traveling business class and eating rich Spanish paella in the smooth temperature-controlled Airbus A340. It was an eleven-hour flight, and they landed in Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport at 6:30 in the morning.

  Meanwhile, Intelligence officers throughout the UK and United States had spent the entire night desperately trying to make sense of that intercepted cell-phone call from Peshawar to Bradford, and only Jimmy Ramshawe, punching his computer keys until they almost melted, came up with anything. He had found a short list of temples built in honor of Janus, and one of them was the original in Cordoba. Jimmy even found out many of the breathtaking Moorish arches were constructed out of jade, marble, and granite from the original temple. That was when he connected the mosque, which had landed on top of Janus. Jimmy deduced that the Chosen Ones were in Spain, in Cordoba, except he was about twenty-four hours too late.

  The “MCM” section of the signal remained, for the moment, a complete mystery. Bob Birmingham’s CIA team was on the case, and so were the Brits in GCHQ Chelte
nham. However there was no break yet. The mindset was still Europe—Bradford and Cordoba—known cradles of potential revolution. And nothing was shaking loose.

  By the time Captain Ramshawe returned to work, two hours in front of Mexico City, Ibrahim and his men were having breakfast and settling into the sparse accommodation in the MCM complex on Avenue Colonia del Valle. They were made welcome, but there was an innate suspicion that these four men were not all that they seemed.

  There was a strong feeling of brotherhood among the imams who lived, worked, and visited this fountain of Islamic progress, for they saw themselves as pioneers, bringing the great religion of the world to a land that was crying out for spiritual help. These four Pakistanis had been recommended, and a wire transfer of money had been made to the Center, from a source that emanated in Tehran. But there was something of the night about these four, who spoke rarely to anyone else. They attended morning prayers and requested that they be served lunch and dinner.

  By any standards, the scarfaced, scowling Abu Hassan Akbar gave the impression of villainy, both in appearance and attitude. Not one of the resident imams believed their names were genuine, and they would be extremely glad when they left.

  Late on that first afternoon a package was delivered to the Muslim center, marked for the attention of Ibrahim. He opened it to find four air tickets from Mexico City to the northern city of Chihuahua, a distance of almost seven hundred miles. It also contained around ten thousand in Mexican pesos, and a note that specified all the details of the night-crossing. Ibrahim swiftly realized this would be a perilous mission. The U.S. border patrols were sick of being made to look foolish, with hundreds of Mexican peasants streaming, illegally, across the border, night after night. They were also sick to death of drug cartels, criminals, and God knows who else, charging through the wire, digging tunnels, knocking down steel fences, and ram-raiding U.S. property. Those U.S. guards were likely to open fire, especially if they suspected they were being assaulted by international criminals.