Intercept Page 32

  MIKE, THE HEAD of the Boston Sleeper Cell, inactive since 2001, didn’t know what hit him. He had walked quietly out into the deserted night garden of Mountainside Farm and had somehow found himself in a war zone.

  He was unconscious for forty-two minutes and woke up with a fractured jaw, lying on the freezing ground, and rapidly descending into shock and dehydration. He dragged himself to his feet and staggered into the house. Ibrahim was appalled at what he saw. His colleague’s jaw was swollen like a football on one side of his face, his head was bleeding where it had hit the ground, and he looked as if he might die here and now.

  “I think someone hit me,” Mike grated through teeth clamped together to relieve the pain. “I need to get to a hospital.”

  Ibrahim did not especially want to order yet another of his team to be shot dead. And he assessed that may not be necessary since Mike was walking wounded, not flat on his back unable to move. Nonetheless, he understood that Mike was no longer a part of the operation and that he could not go to a hospital around here, certainly not the one in Torrington.

  He asked Mike if he could whistle up a couple of replacements in Boston. The broken terrorist was optimistic, and Ibrahim ordered one of the newer arrivals to fire up the muddy truck outside, and drive Mike to Boston, where two replacements would be ready to make the journey back.

  “You mean you just drop me at home?” gritted Mike, “And let me make my own way to a hospital?”

  “I have no choice. Give Ben the numbers of the new recruits and get moving. Allah will look kindly upon you for your sacrifice.”

  Right now, the murderous pain in Mike’s face was all-consuming, and he wanted to tell the boss that he couldn’t give a damn about Allah’s kindly looks. He cared only for a doctor. He knew the jaw was broken, and he knew it needed resetting and probably wiring together. He also knew that whoever, or whatever, had hit him resembled nothing less than a sledgehammer.

  They wrapped Mike in a blanket and helped him into the passenger seat of the jeep, and Ibrahim called a meeting to discuss the exasperating series of “accidents” that had taken place in the past few days. None of them understood what had happened because aside from this unknown assailant, no one was bothering them. The Americans seemed completely unaware of their activities. Except for this raving lunatic running around in the dark flattening people.

  There was no measurable danger, no set of rules, except to stay out of the farmyard after dark. Mike had offered no more clues than the other two, apart from saying there was a bright light shining directly into his eyes before he got hit, like he’d been hit by a car or a truck, and caught in the headlights.

  But there were no cars or trucks on the farm. Someone had punched Mike to the ground. Either that or hit him with a club, or a baseball bat. But who? Who the hell waits around in the dark to whack people? Thieves? Robbers? It beat the hell out of Ibrahim.

  What Ibrahim did know was that half the Muslim world was awaiting news of the forthcoming attack on the Great Satan. Everything was already in place: the time, the dates, the entry, the explosive, the staff, the communications. The project was long past the point of no return. It could not fail. This was the most momentous glory to Allah since 9/11, and he was the head of it, chosen by the Great Ones to take both Islamic and personal revenge on the Satan. For him, there must be rewards of an unfathomable nature, rewards that would one day be bestowed upon him by Allah Himself.

  For he would ultimately cross the bridge, and the three trumpets would sound for him as he entered Paradise. The pleasures of the virgins would await him, and surely the Prophet himself would be there to welcome him home. Ibrahim had never been a seeker of personal glory, but now he stood on the threshold of either earthly glory or undying martyrdom.

  Quite frankly, he preferred earthly glory, but martyrdom in the personal service of Allah was a rarified and exalted thing, and if he should be called upon to make that final and most glorious sacrifice, then he would walk willingly forward to serve his God. Meanwhile he intended to remain light on his feet, as it were, utilizing to the fullest his extremely sophisticated command of the English language perfected in the cafés around Harvard Square.

  MACK BEDFORD’S REQUEST for high explosive was channeled through a convoluted chain of command. Benny Shalit passed it on to Johnny Strauss, who then passed it to his principal contact in the CIA, who alerted Captain Ramshawe, who put in the formal request to Admiral Mark Bradfield, the ex-Carrier Battle Group Commander, who now occupied the Chief of Naval Operation’s chair in the Pentagon.

  The CNO instantly flashed an encrypted signal to Rear-Admiral Andy Carlow, Commander, SPECWARCOM, Coronado. He had it relayed on to the SEAL base at Virginia Beach, which sits on the Atlantic, east of the gigantic Norfolk Naval Base, with its four miles of waterfront on the Hampton Roads Peninsula.

  Every one of those signals was marked FYEO. Every one of them was seen only by those of the highest possible rank. Even the president did not count; he stayed on the bench, out of the secret loop decreed by America’s Security Chiefs.

  The Norfolk base is home to seventeen U.S. Navy Strike-Fighter Squadrons, F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets, and is the sole East Coast Master Jet Base, having, in its time housed such tyrants of the U.S. air space as the fabled VF-101 Grim Reapers.

  The base is on permanent stand-by for World War III, and Johnny Strauss’s boxes suggested that might have already broken out, so urgent and intense was the packing and loading operation. When the two twenty-four-inch boxes were finally sealed, they were placed in the back of a jeep and driven instantly to the Norfolk Station airport, where a Naval aircraft was fired up and ready for take-off.

  The pilots were given the destination only after the boxes were loaded, and the flight took off to the southwest, banked hard to port, and headed north up the Atlantic, staying four or five miles offshore as they headed to the unobtrusive and relatively calm Westchester County Airport, thirty-three miles north of midtown Manhattan.

  This second-line airfield, with its modest 6,500-feet runway, was originally built for the frontline air defense of New York City shortly after Herr Hitler declared on December 11, 1941, that the Reichstag was in a state of war with the United States of America. Since then, the U.S. armed services have always kept one foot in the Westchester operation, but not since Adolph became so openly disagreeable had such a state of pure military priority been announced both to the control tower and ground staff.

  The Naval aircraft came in over the tall trees at the end of the Westchester runway and landed with the kind of practiced gentleness you need when you have a sizeable box of C-4 plastic explosive on board.

  Four naval guards who had traveled with the cargo unloaded it and placed the boxes with great care in the rear section of Johnny Strauss’s dark blue SUV, which was parked on the concrete apron, right behind the wing. It was 11:30 a.m., and Johnny Strauss and Benny Shalit still had more than a hundred miles in front of them.

  Beyond the airport, they looped two-miles around to pick up Route 684, and headed straight to the Connecticut border.

  They pulled into the hotel parking lot at almost 2 p.m. Both men were starved; they hadn’t stopped since their journey began at nine that morning.

  Mack met them in the lobby and checked them in. He’d already ordered three steaks for lunch, but before they went to the dining room he helped them manhandle the three boxes out of the car and up to his room, since he did not want them unattended in a vehicle parked outside a hotel.

  It was 3:30 before they checked the boxes for content. Everything was there, and some of it may not be necessary, but Mack had ordered an explosive package for all seasons. He’d thought of everything, and the three men sat in Mack’s room and conducted a detailed briefing that lasted the rest of the afternoon.

  The former SEAL had an unusual working knowledge of underwater demolition, and he knew how to set and detonate explosive charges of just about every possible description. All SEALs were demolition experts, b
ut it was not such a refined course as that taught to members of the Mossad.

  The fact was, the Israeli Secret Service regarded a stick of dynamite as their weapon of choice, and believed that all of Israel’s major problems could be solved simply with high explosive. As the years had gone by, and Palestinian terrorists had become more and more daring and malevolent, the Mossad had fallen back on the fastest, most brutal and reliable form of attack.

  Which was why Benny Shalit was about to become a cogwheel component of this Black Operation. His specialty was electronic detonation, a subject Mack Bedford had most certainly mastered but was not a world-class operator. Benny was just such a man.

  He was a disciple of Meir Dagan, the small, taciturn former general who now headed up the Mossad. Dagan was a former Paratroop Brigade Commander, a veteran of all the conflicts, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the more recent battles with the trigger-happy rocket battalions of Hezbollah in the Lebanon. He’d fought in the desert, across the burning sands of the Sinai; he’d fought in the hills, on the Golan Heights.

  He’d been awarded the Medal of Courage for his services two years before the Yom Kippur War had even started. And in that heartbreaking conflict, he’d fought with unbridled courage, shoulder to shoulder with his great friend Arik Sharon. Meir Dagan had spent almost a half-century defending the Jewish State, and Arik put him in charge of the Mossad.

  One of his first recruitments was Colonel Benny Shalit. Within months they’d blasted four known terrorists to hell and back with violent bombings. They’d foiled three major Islamic attacks on the Israeli State. And in Damascus, they’d blown the top Hamas military strategist to smithereens with a car bomb. Unrepentant, Meir Dagan’s Mossad blithely admitted what they’d done.

  Somehow or other, the former general had given the most fearsome Secret Service in the world an even sharper killer edge. Young Colonel Shalit worshipped the ground upon which General Dagan walked. He placed him in the first rank of all-time Israeli commanders, as indeed did Arik Sharon. And he shared with him one shining philosophy: a skillfully rigged bomb is superior to all other weapons of limited destruction.

  Such was the man who now moved into position as Mack Bedford’s right hand. “Bomber Benny,” as he would now be known, was no stranger to combat against Hezbollah and Hamas, but on an excitement scale of one to ten, this one had Benny running at around twelve.

  He selected the C-4 explosives and held the nine-inch-long oblong-shaped cakes in his hand, weighing them without thinking, checking the brackets that would hold them, handling the brackets, examining the screws.

  Benny spent even longer on the electronics, spreading the parts out on Mack’s bed, stripping out the wires for length, testing the battery connections. “Better get this stuff in line,” he said. “Don’t want to be doing it tomorrow under pressure.”

  At the end of the afternoon they divided their tools and explosive into sections, packed everything away, and headed downstairs. They checked out the television evening news, and at 7:30 had dinner, during which Mack ate only an omelet.

  At 10 p.m. they put on their parkas and took out the laptop in to the parking lot, where Benny loaded the software and tuned it to the wavelength of a small electronic device, which he had installed on the rear seat of Mack’s Nissan. All three of them could see the green pattern of the screen’s background and the steady sweep of the radar beam making its endless circular clockwise motion.

  “Okay, we’re hooked up to the satellites,” said Benny. “Mack, why don’t you take the vehicle about a mile away somewhere out toward the farm. And then call in on the cell.”

  Mack climbed in and set off, crossed the bridge and turned left, ran right past the farm entrance and pulled up a half-mile down the road. He called Benny’s cell and was told, “Might as well go another couple of miles, then turn around and come back.”

  Mack did as he was told and headed right back to the hotel parking lot, where he found Benny and Johnny right where he’d left them, staring at the screen.

  “We’re golden,” said Benny. “Tracked you all the way out and all the way back. Wherever we put that little bug, it’ll tune right in and show us where it is.”

  “Outstanding,” said Mack. “Now I could use some sleep. Gotta be sharp tomorrow. You been up for almost twenty-four hours. Breakfast at ten?”

  “Good call,” said Benny. “See you then.”

  THURSDAY MORNING dawned brightly in northwest Connecticut, with a cloudless blue sky and the dazzling pale sunlight of mid-October. All seemed especially well in the world as the three secret vigilantes prepared to go to work—Mack Bedford to try to protect his country from further assault; Johnny Strauss to nail the killers who had already raised their swords against Israel; Benny Shalit to carry out the bidding of the vengeful Meir Dagan.

  Their aims were diverse yet noble. Jointly noble. But unless these three separate men worked in perfect unison, the following day might live in history as a day of notoriety, when hundreds of innocent people would die.

  All was most certainly not well with the world, and the bright sunshine of the day heralded a false dawn. A front was closing in from the southeast, directly off the Atlantic, and the forecast for tonight was, quite frankly, lousy.

  All the men had seen the forecast for rain. They all had waterproof parkas and their boots would be fine, but they had only woolen hats, which would rapidly begin to feel like dead black sheep on their heads.

  “We got two choices,” said Mack. “We either get soaked crossing that field or we get some headgear. Maybe black sou’westers.”

  “Jesus we’d have to go to the coast, maybe Bridgeport or New Haven,” said Strauss. “They’re both darn near a hundred miles away.”

  “That’s out of the question,” replied Mack. “We can’t split that far apart from the op-area within ten or twelve hours of H-hour.” (Military: “H” for Hit).

  “No,” said Benny, “But how about some of that sleek waterproof stuff bikers wear? Black racers’ hoods. There’s gotta be a sports shop in Torrington.”

  “That’s the big idea of the day,” said Mack.

  “True genius has many outlets,” confirmed Benny, modestly.

  They decided to stick together because the plan called for such a total level of cooperation, one missing person would put the entire operation in danger. They drove swiftly into Torrington, where they found a sports shop that specialized in mountainclimbing, mountain biking, mountain hiking, and mountain camping.

  They stocked enough black waterproof racing tops with hoods to outfit the massed riders of the Tour de France for ten years. And Benny bought himself a new pair of black calfskin gloves, so thin and perfectly fitted they would have suited a brain surgeon. The expedition took them only twenty minutes.

  Mack wanted to make one more trip, across the street to the hardware store. There he purchased four thick leather box handles and steel brackets, along with three more flashlights and extra batteries, in case of a malfunction. He then had two more copies cut of the keys to each of their vehicles.

  It was after noon by the time they arrived back at the hotel. They had another pot of coffee by the fire in the lounge, and went into the dining room for lunch at 1:30 p.m. The waiter talked them into fresh flounder, which he said had been landed in the small hours of that morning in Stonington, the old Connecticut whaling port up on the Rhode Island border.

  “Three flounders, spinach, and fries,” said Mack. “You got us.”

  All three of them laughed, a rare occurrence in these final hours before the mission. Nerves were tightening, and all of them knew it. Instinctively, each was just a tad more careful in what he said to the others now. Jokes were welcome, but not at anyone else’s expense. Irony was fine, but it had to be humorous. Sarcasm was not fine, and was more or less outlawed.

  These unspoken sensitivities form the silent heart of all military black-operations, missions where men are going to the brink, like tonight’s, where all three could go do
wn in a hail of machine gunfire, out there in that frozen field north of Mountainside Farm.

  The flounder was supreme, fresh as the waiter had promised, and they returned to the fireside, each with a notebook in which his personal tasks would be listed—the ones that could bring down the mission if accomplished late, badly or, worse yet, forgotten. Mack insisted each man also copy the others’ duties, just in case they lost someone. He then distributed the spare keys so that each had instant access to either of the vehicles, in case the regular driver was shot or killed. That, of course, included himself.

  As the hours went by, the tensions grew, and everyone pretended things were fine. Mack was worried about the weight of the boxes on the long walk across the field, but to fix on the handles he would have to drill noisily, and he could scarcely do that in the residents’ lounge of the Blackberry River Hotel. Neither could he do it in his room without someone thinking he was committing murder. But he didn’t want to use up any battery power. He needed a wall outlet to drill eight holes in the sides of the boxes—all this for a couple of minutes’ work. Damn.

  In the end he decided on the bedroom, with a major diversion outside in the corridor. Just before 5 p.m., he went to the maid’s station at the top of the stairs on the second floor and hauled out the cart that contained jugs of ice water, bed linens and waste baskets. He pushed it toward No. 28, and then capsized the entire thing with a crash of broken jugs, ice-water, and God knows what else.

  The drill started instantly. Mack shot into his room and picked up the phone, telling the receptionist something shocking had happened in the corridor right outside his room. She’d better send staff and maybe come herself. He was uncertain what had happened.

  Within moments there was chaos in the corridor. All twelve members of staff on duty for the evening—maids, waiters, cooks, kitchen hands, and the doorman—were up there, shouting, righting the cart, and clearing up the mess.

  Benny Shalit’s screaming electric drill went unnoticed as eight neat holes were bored into the boxes. And while the general panic in the corridor continued, Mack and his men screwed two leather handles onto each one. And they did not leave the room until peace was restored on the second floor of the Blackberry River Hotel.