The troops came to arrest Ashrawl’s brothers who were accused of being involved with Hezbollah. When his father had protested that they were not, the government troops shot him, then shot his brothers and his mother. His family had been unarmed, yet the soldiers murdered them in cold blood.
It was the turning point for the twelve-year-old Ashrawl. From that day forward, he had been involved with Hezbollah. They protected him, cared for him, fed him and ensured he received an education and proper medical care. They had become his family; and now he would betray them in order to live a few more years.
The sound of an approaching car startled him from his musings. It pulled right up to the guard and stopped. At first, he thought it was the FBI, here to finalize their deal, but they were very early. They typically didn’t arrive until the afternoon.
When the men exited the car, a second guard approached quickly from behind the house, stopping a half-dozen yards off to the side of the first guard. Both guards were armed with submachine guns and held them leveled at the men from the car.
Three of the men stood outside the car watching Ashrawl. The obvious leader of the group approached the guard, flashed his credentials and handed over some papers. The guard appeared to read the papers, and then handed them back. For several moments, they stood talking before the conversation broke down into an argument as evidenced by loud voices and hand gestures. Unsure what was happening, Ashrawl remained riveted in place, watching the drama unfold before him.
When a third guard arrived at the front of the house, the men by the car became restless and took up shooting stances behind the car doors. Ashrawl began looking for somewhere to escape to. This wasn’t looking good.
After several tense moments, the shift commander came outside and began speaking with the man from the car. He took several minutes to review the packet of papers that the man provided. He then pulled his cell phone from his pocket and made a brief call.
While he spoke on the phone, he paced back and forth in front of the car. A moment later, he hung up and glanced at Ashrawl before saying something to the man, who, in turn, nodded to his men. Then the whole group walked off towards the house, leaving Ashrawl and his guard alone outside.
“Ashrawl. Let’s go,” the young, colored guard with the crew cut shouted at him from the driveway.
“What’s going on?” Ashrawl asked. His voice was filled with concern, but he remained where he was.
“Questions, questions, questions,” the guard replied brusquely.
“Who are those men?” Ashrawl asked, uncertain if he should go into the house. There was something about the visitors that made him very uneasy.
“Now, Ashrawl,” the guard commanded. Ashrawl began walking towards the guard as he looked about the property, much like a trapped animal does when looking for an escape route. The guard waited until Ashrawl had stepped past him before he followed him as he walked to the house.
“Are those men with the FBI?” Ashrawl asked over his shoulder.
“Nope. NSA,” the guard answered curtly.
“Oh. Why are they here? I thought I would be dealing with the FBI?” Ashrawl asked, his voice cracking slightly as he spoke.
“Haven’t you heard? We’re just one big happy family since 9/11,” the guard snapped sarcastically.
“I only want to deal with the FBI,” Ashrawl stated sullenly. “I will not talk to anyone except them.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” the guard said as he stopped at the bottom of the steps leading up to the front door, though Ashrawl continued climbing them. Ashrawl stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to look at the guard, still standing at the bottom of the steps.
“You aren’t coming inside?” Ashrawl inquired as his eyes filled with panic.
“I’m to stay outside,” the guard answered coldly as he turned away from Ashrawl.
“I…” Ashrawl started to say something but then stopped. He stepped across the wide porch to the front door and opened it, resigned to his fate.
Two sets of hands shot out of the house and grabbed him by the arms, yanking him through the door and throwing him to the floor. Immediately, two men began kicking him in the ribs and back. Ashrawl curled up into a ball trying to protect himself from the barrage.
After several minutes of being kicked, the men stopped. Ashrawl was then dragged through the house, out the back door, down the steps and over to the detached garage. There they duct taped him to a wooden chair, and a man began slapping his face, which quickly graduated into punching.
Ashrawl begged for the beating to stop, but the pleading fell on deaf ears. Several times, Ashrawl lost consciousness only to have his torturers revive him and begin beating him again. He began blurting out information in an effort to get the beating to stop, but it continued unabated. The beating continued for over three hours, leaving him a bloody mess and in need of serious medical care.
It was at that point that the torture went from bad to worse. A black bag was placed over his head and the chair was tipped back. Ashrawl struggled against the tape, but he was far too weak to pull free. One of the men punched Ashrawl in the stomach, and as he tried to suck in air, they began pouring water over his face. Ashrawl panicked and squirmed in the chair. They were waterboarding him.
Ashrawl was unable to catch his breath as the water filled his mouth and his nose. Drowning, he struggled with every last bit of strength he had, but the tape held. After three minutes, Ashrawl’s struggles slowly twitched to a stop. After another three minutes without movement, one of the men checked his pulse, finding none. It was over. The men quickly cleaned themselves up and walked around to the front of house, back to their car. As they passed, one of the men handed the CIA guard the original orders, saying, “He’s all yours.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was late afternoon when Yousef arrived in Hamburg and quickly found himself mired in its infamous rush hour traffic. Hamburg is Germany’s second largest city after Berlin and comes with all the trappings of any other big city.
For Yousef, the traffic was both a curse and a blessing. It was a curse because it delayed Yousef’s arrival in the city’s Warehouse Quarter, where he was to meet the cell members and finalize the plan of attack for the day after tomorrow.
It was a blessing because it allowed Yousef to look down upon the huge industrial complex just across the river from the city center that spanned the horizon in all directions. From his vantage point on the bridge, he was able to see the city from a whole new perspective.
His position on the Autobahn #255 bridge, where it crosses the Elbe River in the center of the city, provided a bird’s eye view of the river and its many intersecting canals. Ships and barges were fed into the bowels of the industrial complex via the canals. He could see hundreds of long, narrow barges that were utilized to transfer the smaller shipments of goods upriver. It also provided a significant overview of the gas terminals with their surrounding storage fields and pumping plants. He could clearly see the container facilities and the rail yards, just northeast of the city center. In fact, he had an excellent view all the way to the Airbus facility, eight kilometers to the northeast, and of the shipbuilding yards, two kilometers to the west.
Besides being the second largest city in Germany, Hamburg has the largest port in the heart of Europe, supporting Germany’s industrial center. The city was first settled in the eighth century and was named after a castle that was built on the mud flats that ran along the edge of the Elbe River. It served as a center for commerce, just as the city does today. The port of Hamburg plays a prominent economic role in Europe, processing over seven million shipping containers annually and is home to several hundred international corporations’ European headquarters. It also plays a major diplomatic role for Europe, housing over ninety-seven foreign consulates.
Hamburg is home to corporate headquarters for publishing, media, shipbuilding (Blohm + Voss), airplane manufacturing (one of two Airbus assembly facilities is located here), auto manufacturing
(BMW and Volkswagen), and the main distribution center for oil and natural gas for the northern parts of Europe. In addition, it serves as a main transportation hub serving commercial airlines, international rail services and several major cruise lines for both commercial goods and passenger service for Northern and Western Europe and beyond.
Yousef couldn’t help relishing the fact that Hamburg was the perfect target as it was home to the main oil and gas distribution center for Western Europe. It had over ten square kilometers of above ground and more than a hundred square kilometers of below ground gas storage facilities, hundreds of acres of oil storage facilities, and six oil refineries. Hamburg was where most of Western Europe’s gasoline was made. By being such an industrial city, Hamburg had provided the means to its own destruction, just as it had in World War II.
On July 28th, 1943, the British carpet bombed Hamburg in an effort to eliminate the Third Reich’s ability to manufacture ships and planes for their war effort. The resulting firestorm destroyed over ninety percent of Hamburg and killed more than forty-two thousand men, women and children. Hamburg’s industrial underbelly—everything south of the Elbe River—was turned into ashes, as well as the city center and the rail yards to the northeast. The thought of Hamburg once again being reduced to ashes put a smile on Yousef’s face. God willing, the death toll would be a hundred times higher than the death toll from the British bombings.
Seeking to break loose from the traffic backlog, Yousef exited the Autobahn for the city streets and found himself marveling at the architecture in the old town section of Hamburg. The buildings were built in the gingerbread style that was so prevalent in Germany, Austria, Luxemburg and Switzerland in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds.
Driving further into the old town section, Yousef discovered Hamburg had a system of canals which reminded him of cities like Venice and Amsterdam. In dozens of the old town neighborhoods, the canals served as the streets, requiring a person to own a boat rather than a car to live there. He remembered reading that Hamburg had a large number of people who actually lived on houseboats in the canals, just as they do in Amsterdam and Paris. It was considered to be ultra-chic by the infidels.
Within Hamburg’s Old Town is an area bordering the river called the Warehouse Quarter. The area is so named because it is approximately two square kilometers of old warehouses that served as the port of Hamburg from the late 1400s until the end of the 1800s. The Warehouse Quarter is still used as a transfer point for merchandise destined for other European countries. There are no customs inspectors in the Quarter, which the local criminal element uses to its advantage to import drugs, people, guns and any number of illegal items.
The Quarter is also home to Hamburg’s vibrant red light district, where one can purchase the perversion of your choice, from the lowest of disease-ridden street walkers (popular with sailors from around the world), to the ultra-high class escorts that visiting businessmen and political figures favor.
In addition, the far western edge of the Warehouse Quarter is home to a large number of Middle Eastern immigrants and was Yousef’s final destination. The apartment he sought was located above an import/export business on a narrow street, barely wide enough for today’s autos. Lining both sides of the street were four-story buildings which cast a perpetual shadow over the area, giving it a distinct fairytale feel. As they have for close to five hundred years, the trade goods still arrived and departed via the canals at the rear of the buildings, utilizing the long, narrow barges to ship goods in and out of the area.
The cell members had been living and working in Hamburg for over three years. All twelve men had found work at the oil and gas processing plants, where they unloaded oil and natural gas shipments. That was truly God’s will.
Each member of the crew had also attended Merchant Marine school after arriving in Hamburg. They had all learned the skills necessary to maneuver a supertanker into the port of Hamburg through the Elbe River. Three of the twelve earned their pilot’s licenses in preparation for martyring themselves if needed, in order to achieve victory for Allah.
The plan was simple. Members of the cell were to infiltrate the terminal the night before, planting three dozen bombs within the maze of piping that made up the terminal’s processing plant. When the LNG tanker (scheduled to arrive at noon the following day) had docked, they were to board the ship and take control.
They were to plant magnesium flare bombs by slipping them down the containment vessel’s vent stacks. They were to then seal off the stacks, causing a buildup of gas vapors which would change the pressure within the vessels, causing the liquefied gas to boil. ‘Boiling’ of the gas is the process by which the liquefied gas is turned back into its gaseous state. Until a sufficient amount of the liquefied gas has been converted back into vapor, the LNG is non-flammable and non-explosive.
The Pakistani scientists who developed the bombs and the plan to explode the tankers, had told Yousef it would take at least an hour for the gas to build up enough to change the pressure within the containment vessel. The magnesium flare bombs would be timed to provide adequate time for the gas to boil.
In addition to blowing up the ship, the cell members were to attempt to take hostage as many dock workers as possible. Failing that, they were to simply kill as many as they could. Yousef hoped that taking hostages would draw in large numbers of the local police, as well as military terror response teams. The whole purpose of taking the hostages was to delay any effort to retake the ship, allowing the pressure to build to an explosive level in the containment vessels.
While this was happening, the rest of the cell, including Yousef, were to hijack another LNG supertanker. They would commandeer one from the stationing area off Cuxhaven, a small town at the mouth of the Elbe at the North Sea. There were always two or three waiting there to be piloted into port. The trip would take just over an hour to reach the bridges at the city center. Once there, they would blow it up, in conjunction with the tanker at the gas terminal.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Their meeting today was with Senator Bains, Bill Richland and Robert Westlyn at Kilauea’s recycling plant in Bryson City, North Carolina. Bryson City was a small town nestled in the beautiful valley of the Tuckasegee River just outside the southern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
On the agenda was the latest intelligence in regard to the Brotherhood of the Sword, plus making a decision regarding how best to alert the FBI to the coming attacks on Chicago and Gary, Indiana without revealing Kilauea Corporation’s involvement. Then there was the little problem of the president taking bribes and signing yet another unconstitutional executive order, this one dealing with Homeland Security having the right to enter and search homes without obtaining a search warrant or having probable cause.
When it came to the bribes, they had irrefutable proof. They had names, dates, account numbers and amounts. They also knew who had paid the bribes—Solution Brothers Trust. Whose pocket the money actually came from was still unknown, but they had suspects. After all, the company was listed as 501(c)(3) non-profit whose stated goal was to advocate for the better treatment of Muslims in America.
The information that David Ashrawl had supplied had proven to be a treasure trove. He implied that over three hundred members of Congress and dozens of the top bureaucrats in the State Department, Justice, Defense and even Homeland Security had been compromised through illegal campaign contributions.
Steven and Chip hoped once Senator Bains was presented with the facts, she’d agree to join them and help them find a way to save the country. The information was a powder keg waiting to explode into a scandal so big it would crush most countries. It was the kind of information that people would kill to keep secret.
The first order of business after arriving at the plant for Kilauea Corporation’s owner and chief operating officer wasn’t to race into the meeting. Rather, it was to take a quick tour of the facilities and say hello to all of the employees, thanking them for their hard work. Stev
en then had lunch brought in for them as an additional thank you. His efforts to be friendly to his employees and to make sure he showed his appreciation had paid off with the lowest turnover rate of any large corporation in the world, plus the highest production rates, equaling profits that everyone shared in. People really liked working for him. Steven was truly unique.
Reprisal!- The Eagle's Sorrow Page 5