They had chosen PETN explosives, a powerful military grade explosive. The explosive power of PETN is measured in the ratio of ounces of PETN to a ton of TNT. This explosive, based on the size they were using (about five pounds per bomb), would have the explosive power of over one hundred and sixty tons of TNT.
After they checked the shapes, they preset all of the timers, though they did not connect them to the bombs just yet. They were unwilling to risk the chance of a premature explosion. It would, as they say, ruin their whole day. They then carefully packed everything away in backpacks, leaving only prayers to be said and the plan to be executed.
At approximately three a.m., the five man terminal assault team left the flat via an underground tunnel. The tunnel had been dug by smugglers four centuries before and wound its way under the buildings of the Warehouse Quarter to the basement of a building three-quarters of a kilometer away. It was in front of that building that they had parked the van they had stolen from a shipping company twelve hours ago.
They had picked this particular company because its office and warehouse were just a half-kilometer from the gas terminal in the Wilhelmsburg District. Left with a flat tire so as not to draw attention when it was found, the van would be abandoned a short distance down the road from the damaged portion of fence.
The hole in the fence had been created several months ago by a couple of cell members. Yousef learned that evening that the reason no one had repaired the damaged fence was that the man in charge of making such repairs was, in fact, a member of the cell, and he had purposely forgotten about it.
After the five men had left, everyone except Aijaz and Yousef tried to get some sleep. Yousef became concerned because he noticed Aijaz was clearly troubled by something. A man who could not control his fears or doubts could make mistakes, thus jeopardizing the mission. Yousef waited until he thought the others were asleep, then asked Aijaz what was wrong.
“Aijaz, you appear troubled. Can I help you?” Yousef asked in a confidential manner that belied his true intentions. He needed to know if Aijaz was going to be a problem during the mission. If it appeared he would be, Yousef would kill him before the mission even started.
“I have prayed,” Aijaz began, “and I will gladly give my life for Allah, but I am troubled by the fact that our mission will kill so many of the faithful. How will Allah view my sacrifice in light of their deaths?”
“That is a good and righteous question. Allah will view them as martyrs as well, but only those who are truly faithful. Many of our brethren have fallen prey to the Western devil’s mindset. They smoke, drink alcohol and fornicate with Western women. They pretend to attend prayers. They are unclean and unworthy of going to Paradise. They allow their women to dress provocatively, to drive cars, become educated, and to tell them what to do. Their children want to be Madonna or Britney Spears, dancing naked before God and the masses.
“They have disavowed the Koran by refusing to follow its teachings. Do not worry about your place in Paradise. Allah will provide for you and bless your family, for you have done your duty to him. Praise Allah with continued silent prayers, now and throughout the mission. You will have nothing to fear.”
Yousef hoped that his explanation would bring comfort to the young man and end his doubts. It was the same explanation Yousef’s imam had used to dispel his own doubts while at the madrasa many years ago, and then again, while attending the training camps. Leaning close to the young man, he said, “Remember, God is great, and through him we can do anything. Allahu Akbar!”
“Yes, I know you are right. I will make my father proud. I will not think of the others again. Allahu Akbar!” Aijaz mimicked Yousef as he rolled over on his stomach mumbling a prayer to Allah. This would be his ` nighttime prayer, perhaps his last before being martyred for Allah.
First thing in the morning, the watchers made their usual shift changes. At seven a.m., the nightshift team left and the dayshift team took over. Yousef and two of the remaining members of the cell, after their dawn prayer or their Fajr, left the building using the same tunnel as the five men who would lead the terminal attack.
Upon reaching the other end of the tunnel, they circled back to the street the flat was on, coming up behind the watchers. The first watcher they had to deal with was the man at the far end of the street.
One of the cell members used a small rowboat, borrowed from a neighbor’s dock, to move unseen beyond the watcher’s location via the canal behind the buildings. Once he was at the end of the cul-de-sac, he walked back towards the man from his rear flank.
Upon seeing the cell member approach the man at the far end of the street, Yousef and another cell member approached the second watcher at the near end of the street. They were approaching him from the rear, as well.
A dozen yards from where the man stood his post, Yousef crossed the street, drawing the man’s attention. This allowed the other man to approach him without being seen.
With one quick pass of his hand, he slit the man’s throat with a box cutter and pulled him back inside a doorway where he would not be seen by the men in the car halfway down the street.
The man at the far end of the block stood in a doorway reading a newspaper as the cell member approached from behind the building. When he stepped around the corner of the building, he stepped in front of the minder, and in one quick thrust, plunged a large kitchen knife into the man’s throat.
The newspaper caught the brunt of the blood splatter as the cell member stepped up close so he could reach out and hold the man upright by pinning him against the wall of the building.
The man’s comrades in the car mid-block could see the two men at the far end of the street, but could not determine exactly what was happening. The driver of the car began trying to reach their fellow officer via radio.
Despite numerous tries, they received only static in reply. As the seconds passed, they grew more concerned that their fellow officer was not responding. Unsure if something was wrong, the driver started the car and was about to drive down to the end of the street when he glanced in his side view mirror.
Immediately, he knew something was definitely wrong. The other watcher should have been visible in the mirror, but that was not the case. Instead of putting the car in gear and pulling forward, he turned his head, looking back towards the end of the street where the man should have been.
His partner in the car also turned his head following his partner’s move. This gave Yousef all the opening he needed. He quickly stepped up next to the car on the passenger side, leaned in the window, and smiled.
He shot both men with a silenced .40 caliber Sig Sauer handgun. He fired two rounds into the chest of each man rather than their heads, avoiding drawing attention to them. Since they would be left sitting in their car, Yousef did want anyone discovering the minders were dead until it was too late to stop the mission.
Yousef quickly walked away from the still-idling car, while the other two watchers’ bodies were dragged inside the buildings and deposited in the basements.
The five men on the terminal attack team had slipped into the terminal around four a.m. They spent the next two hours setting bombs in predetermined locations throughout the terminal, before gathering at the construction trailer less than a hundred meters from where the ship would be berthed around noon. Having rehearsed the mission over and over for the past five years, the men were very relaxed.
In fact, the whole mission was now second nature to them. They even joked among themselves that they were so well-trained, they could do the mission blindfolded.
To pass the time while waiting for the ship to arrive, the men played cards. The game they played was called Basra, which is similar to the Western card game of Casino.
At first light, they said their morning prayers and ate a meal of cheese and bread between hands of the card game. Only once during six hours of waiting did they face possible discovery. That was when a guard on rounds stopped his golf cart in front of the trailer, climbed out and b
egan walking towards the construction trailer.
He was acting as though he was going to check the trailer door to be sure it was locked or perhaps even look inside. He stopped halfway to the door, though, when his radio chirped, letting him know that his morning pastry had arrived from the bakery. He turned around without checking anything, climbed back into his golf cart and drove away, giving himself a few more hours of life.
Yousef and his five man team drove to the boat ramp west of the city on the Elbe River, where the twenty-four foot aluminum boat was docked.
Once they had loaded several large cartons on board, Aijaz swung the boat into the current and sailed downriver towards Brunsbuttel and the harbor master’s dock.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jason Combs was riding high when he pulled up to the White House in his brand new Porsche 911. He got it fully loaded for the bargain price of $105,600. He got the great price because in the down economy, not too many people were buying expensive cars. He also paid cash, which had gotten him an additional discount.
It was the ultimate present to himself, which he felt he deserved for his ridiculously long hours and the 24/7 effort he was giving his man—the president.
The truly wondrous part was that it hadn’t made much of a dent in his finances. He had used the cash from his life savings here in the States and a minor amount, really just enough to pay the taxes, title and license fees, from his secret Grand Cayman account.
He thought he was smart about retrieving the cash from the account. He’d taken a day off, with President Stark’s permission of course, and flew down to the Caymans to withdraw the money in person. That way there would be no paper trail like what was produced when you wired money to or from overseas bank accounts.
While he was there, he also did a little banking by proxy for President Starks and Roger Bascome, since neither of them wanted any wire transfers showing up in their names, either. The proxy system was Bascome’s idea. Shortly after the payments had begun, he had gone down to Grand Cayman and withdrew his entire account, wiring the money to a bank in Cyprus, and lesser amounts for Bascome and the president. Everything had worked just fine.
Jason, however, one-upped Bascome on the next trip by stopping by Government House to speak with the foreign minister about a possible meeting with the president. That way, the trip would be paid for by the taxpayers, saving Jason a grand.
On that same day, when he stopped in at the bank to withdraw money from each of the three accounts, he unfortunately made a major mistake. He had inadvertently checked the box for a wire transfer when his had meant to check the cash withdrawal box.
By the time his personal banker had returned with his receipts, it was too late. The transfers had already taken place. The president and Bascome had only minor amounts transferred—nothing that would be flagged by the IRS. Jason, however, had taken out enough money to finalize the car purchase, plus an additional fifteen thousand dollars to jumpstart the replenishment of his personal account.
It was flagged and noted in the weekly and monthly reports to Homeland Security and the FEC. Combs had been royally balled out by the president for being so stupid, but what was done was done. Combs had planned to gradually deposit the extra fifteen thousand dollars over the next three months, keeping the amounts well below the IRS reporting requirements while doing so. But now, he had already drawn their attention, and he had no choice but to declare the money on his taxes and move on. He hoped that by paying right away, the transaction would drop off the list and no one would be the wiser. He was wrong again.
*****
The Kilauea Corp. computers in Bryson City gathered the transactions, along with several thousand more, directly from the IRS computers as they were reported by the banks. Steven had been the designer and builder of the system now in place at both the IRS and most of the major banks, so it was quite easy for his systems to gather the intelligence once again without anyone knowing.
Bill Richland had devised a program to seek out any financial transactions by anyone he deemed to be of value in the search for illegal foreign bribes. He had placed President Starks, Roger Bascome, Jason Combs and most of the Senate and Congress on the list. He then placed the entire roster of high-ranking individual federal bureaucrats on the program, as well. Then, just for good measure, he added several dozen names from Wall Street and Forbe’s Fortune Five Hundred list. It was quite a list and would have taken the computers at the FBI months to sort it all out with the constant incoming data stream. But it wasn’t half of what the Kilauea computers were capable of.
To keep up with the flood of information, Steven had installed eight of the fastest and most sophisticated computers his mind could think up. He had installed them originally in Richmond, at Kilauea’s world headquarters two years ago, but when he started his private army, he had them reinstalled in Bill’s offices at the Bryson City plant in North Carolina. Now, instead of it taking weeks or months to see preliminary results as it did when he was with the FBI, Bill would see final results in the next few days.
In addition to watching the stateside transactions of this group, Bill also had the hacking staff hack into the banking systems in Switzerland, Cyprus, Grand Caymans, Belize, Brazil and Brunei. All of these countries are known to hold their banking records very close to their vests and not to ask too many questions about where the money came from or where it was going, provided they got their small cut for handling the transactions.
The results of this search would take more time as many, if not most, of the accounts these institutions held are simply identified by numbers, not names. Once they had been hacked, it required scanning the records and trying to match up the amounts of the transactions to deposits or withdrawals in the States or some other country that played similar numbers games.
Bill had found out just how difficult that could be after 9/11, when the FBI was mandated as part of the War on Terror to find the source of the money used by the terrorists to finance their operations. Some of the money sources had been found, but most hadn’t because shortly thereafter, the politicians decided to stop the search after heavy lobbying by foreign banking interests.
It was felt that the search was hurting America’s image overseas. Some in Congress felt it was heavy-handed to force our supposed allies to hand over their banking records. If America found out which individual accounts they were using, they would be glad to cooperate, but that was as far as it went.
The Kilauea program began spitting out matches after a week, and Bill got more and more excited with each new computer-generated match. Of course, they would have to follow up with confirmation of the information, but it sure looked like the effort was going to pay off. He was shaken to the core when he realized that some of the payoffs had taken place as far back as the nineteen eighties, right about the time of the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When President Starks strolled into the Oval Office for his nightly staff meeting with Combs and Bascome, they could tell he was in a hurry. “What have you got for me, Jason?” he blurted out, crossing the room without even saying hello, the ever-present photographer trailing behind him.
This time, the president went around behind his desk, sat down and looked out the window. He then bent his right elbow and drew his hand up under his chin, making it appear as though he was in deep thought. “How’s that look?” he asked the photographer, before Combs could say anything.
“Very nice, Mister President. You look very diplomatic,” the man quipped as he continued taking pictures.
“What do you think? Roger and I over here in front of the fireplace?” the president asked, though it was an order, not a question. Roger Bascome stood up and stepped in front of the fireplace as the president stepped up next to him, putting an arm around him, while he appeared to look over his shoulder at some papers he was holding. The photographer took several pictures, and then he was dismissed with a wave of the president’s hand.
“So,
Jason, let’s have it,” Starks stated curtly. Combs handled updating the president on domestic issues, and Bascome handled the international issues.
“Yes, sir. The reconstruction of Houston is moving along, but the oil companies are balking at rebuilding on the same sites. They say they need more capacity, and that requires more room. Plus, they’re asking for you to delay the new environmental standards because they are too expensive in today’s market, and to get Treasury to guarantee twenty-five billion in loans.” Jason shared the basics of the negotiations he had been embroiled in for weeks.
Reprisal!- The Eagle's Sorrow Page 10