Jihad db-5

by Stephen Coonts

  “Lia, what’s going on?” Telach asked.

  “Someone was eyeballing me over near the Baghdad Pavilion,” she said. “I don’t think he wanted a date.”

  “Did he follow you?”

  “No. I’m having some tea,” she added for the approaching waiter. “Just sugar.”

  Lia leaned back in the chair as the waiter left. “Where’s Charlie?”

  “He’s directly below the palace walls, several levels down. We’d like you to plant some more video bugs,” added Telach. “We want to try and catch a glimpse of who’s at the meeting as they leave.”

  “Who’s going to back up Charlie?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Someone should be backing him up.”

  “He’s fine, Lia. Mr. Rockman will tell you where to set up the bugs.”

  * * *

  About halfway down the long stone staircase, the light from above faded completely to black. Dean moved down slowly, guided by the light of his keychain flashlight. When he reached the bottom of the steps, he crouched and played the light around the space in front of him. He’d reached another large room, this one with a low ceiling. A forest of thick stone pillars ranged in front of him.

  Dean nearly jumped when he heard a light scraping sound to the right. He turned his light but saw nothing.

  A rat, probably.

  “How we doing, Charlie?” asked Rockman.

  “We’re doing fine.”

  “We’re just barely reading you, Charlie. Turn on the booster and let’s make sure we can get a signal.”

  Dean took the unit out and activated it.

  “Hang on a second,” said Rockman.

  Dean waited while they dealt with whatever technical issues were involved in switching the communications over the different channels.

  “Got it. Okay,” said Rockman finally. “But we still don’t have Red Lion.”

  “Charlie, do you have one booster or two?” asked Telach.

  “Two.”

  “Leave one there, and activate the other. It’ll act as a relay as you go.”

  “All right.”

  Dean put the transmitter down, then walked forward, keeping his light aimed at the floor. After he’d gone sixty paces, he saw a wall ahead. He moved along it to the right, his heart pounding so loudly he could barely hear Rockman when the runner told him to turn right.

  “There’s another set of steps downward about ten yards away,” said Rockman. “That level is a warren of spaces and hallways that extend to the old Byzantine fortress walls by the highway.”

  “You think he grabbed a car out there?”

  “No. He hasn’t come aboveground. He’s somewhere between you and those old ruins,” said Rockman. “There are no other passages that link up to where we lost him. But where, exactly, I don’t know.”

  When he reached the wall, Dean saw a faint light filtering along the floor about twenty yards away. As he approached, he heard the echo of a voice. But the booster still wasn’t picking up Asad. Dean flattened himself against the wall, moving slowly toward the opening.

  “They’re guards,” said Rockman when Dean finally drew close enough for his microphone to pick up their echoes. “We’re definitely close.”

  Dean didn’t answer. Instead, he started moving back the way he came.

  “Where are you going, Charlie?”

  Still close to the guards, Dean remained silent. He took another few steps, then froze — a pair of eyes were watching him ten yards away.

  Red eyes.

  A rat.

  But it was at his height. How could that be?

  Dean lifted the flashlight and flicked it on and off. The rat scurried to the right, running along a ledge in the wall. To the left of the ledge was a square opening about three feet on each side right above the ledge. The bottom of the opening was covered with a slimy moss.

  “Where does this hole go?” Dean whispered.

  “Hold on.”

  Dean climbed up into the hole and shone the flashlight down it. He heard squeals, then the sound of wings. He flattened himself just in time to avoid a pair of bats as they flew overhead, exiting the passage — and then returning, disappearing somewhere beyond the small beam of his light.

  Rats, bats, and sewer slime. Clearly Asad was around here somewhere.

  CHAPTER 37

  Dr. Ramil nodded at the desk clerk as he left the hotel, stepping out in the overcast day. He started up the hill toward the Blue Mosque, then turned left and walked through the small array of shops that stood at its base. The open windows of the Mosaic Museum drew his attention; he went through the small alley to the entrance, paying a few lira to walk above the faded stones that had once decorated a Byzantine emperor’s palace. The scenes of daily life roughly fifteen hundred years ago didn’t hold his interest, however, and he soon found himself back outside, walking in the direction of the Bazaar Quarter. He made his way across Veniçeriler Caddesi, one of the old city’s main boulevards crowded with shoe stores and banks. Ducking one of the trams that ran down the wide street, he wandered into the tangle of alleyways near the Grand Bazaar. Everything was for sale here; he passed rows of stores with toys, then a handful of others selling guns, still more with kitchen goods. He’d been in the Bazaar Quarter a week before, while getting oriented to the city, but nothing looked familiar until he reached the Ṣark Kahvesi, a cafe on the western side of the bazaar, far from where he had started. He stopped and had some Turkish coffee, extra sweet, and listened to the merchants nearby complaining in Turkish that business had fallen off. From there he wandered farther south, passing through the Spice Bazaar and emerging near the New Mosque and the Galata Bridge. A man with a stubble beard waved an array of Turkish flags at him, trying to coax him into buying one before moving on.

  The New Mosque stood before him on the right, a towering succession of domes that topped graying concrete. He turned and began walking in the other direction.

  He’d been avoiding mosques all day, Ramil thought; he’d walked by not only the Blue Mosque but the majestic Süleymaniye at the heart of the Bazaar Quarter as well.

  Just then, the call to prayers sounded. Ashamed, Ramil changed direction and went toward the gate. As he did, a flock of pigeons took flight; the birds were so numerous that they darkened the sky. Surprised, Ramil shielded his head as they flapped by, ducking his head as if afraid they would hit him.

  He washed his feet at the fountain, then left his shoes at the door. The air inside the mosque was cool. The air and filtered light cleared his head. He began to pray, holding his hands up and then clasping them, bending and bowing, kneeling and kissing the ground.

  “God is Greater,” he said in Arabic, using the words inscribed in his memory as a child. “In the Name of God, the Compassionate Source of All Mercy, All Praise be to God.”

  The words resounded in his head as if his entire body were hollow. At the end of his prayer, turning right and then left to wish peace to those nearby, he felt slightly dizzy. He stayed on his knees, lightheaded.

  When he rose, Ramil caught sight of an old man with a prayer cap nearby.

  The man eyed him accusingly. Unnerved, Ramil turned and found another man, this one very young, glaring at him as well. There were others back near the door, whispering.

  Were they talking about him? He couldn’t hear what they said.

  Was he just being paranoid? No one could possibly notice him here.

  Ramil glanced around. The men he’d thought were watching him before were looking at other parts of the mosque.

  It must have been his imagination; the stress of the mission was starting to make him paranoid.

  Ramil stepped back, admiring the soaring dome above him. The mosaics made the ceiling seem as if it were floating in air.

  A traitor and coward.

  Though hushed, the voice he heard was distinct, and nearby. Ramil turned but could not see who had said it.

  Traitor? Were they referring to him?

  Asad b
in Taysr would claim that any Muslim who worked against him was a traitor. He and all of his ilk claimed that any Muslim who collaborated with the “Crusaders” should face death as heretics.

  But Ramil was not a traitor. Neither was he a coward. He had not accomplished much in life, perhaps — not in many years — he had no children, or a legacy to speak of, but he was not a bad man. Asad, bin Laden, al-Qaeda and all their filthy, twisted comrades — they were the evil ones.

  Traitor! Coward!

  By the time Ramil reached his shoes, his heart was thumping fiercely. He started for the nearby tram stop, then, seeing a taxi, ran in front of it to flag it down. The driver jerked his head out of his window, looking at him as if he were a madman.

  “I need to go back to my hotel,” he told the man in Arabic.

  The driver scowled at him.

  Was he accusing him as well? Of what? Of being a coward? Of being worthless? A traitor?

  No. Few people understood Arabic in Turkey, aside from the prayers they memorized.

  “My hotel,” Ramil repeated, this time in English.

  The driver jerked his thumb toward the back. He had another fare.

  Another taxi stopped a few feet away. Ramil stepped back, nodding, bending his head in apology. Panic rose in his chest, but he fought against it, walking to the other car and gently opening the door.

  CHAPTER 38

  When Rubens entered the Art Room, he went directly to Rockman’s console at the front of the room.

  “Where is Mr. Dean now?” Rubens asked the runner.

  “He’s in a passage under the Topkapi Palace, headed toward the ruins of Constantinople’s old sea wall. We’re not exactly sure what these passages were. They look like the complex of Byzantine cisterns up near the Hippodrome, or maybe it was a residential district buried by one of the earthquakes. We can’t find any documentation.”

  “Has Dean found Asad?”

  “He’s close, but we still don’t have the signal.”

  “How can that be?”

  “We have a theory,” said Telach, coming over. “The room may be shielded. It’s probably one of these on the right.”

  Rubens looked at the schematic sketched from the ground-penetrating radar. While it wasn’t technically difficult to shield a room from radio waves, it did require considerable preparation and expense. It was conceivable that Asad or someone in his circles had arranged this, but it seemed out of character.

  So perhaps the shielding was already there.

  “They’re in a mausoleum,” said Rubens. “A large bronze tomb. Or a treasury room. Get an opinion from the technical team on whether the radio waves can penetrate them. There’s no sense having Mr. Dean prowling old sewers if there’s no hope of picking up the signal.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Dean squeezed forward through the square stone tunnel, trying to ignore the dust that was choking him. Every ten feet or so he came to an opening too narrow to crawl into; he shone his light down them but inevitably saw nothing. The tunnel ahead widened; he pushed toward it slowly, listening to the strange echoes. As he neared the passage, the urge to sneeze overwhelmed him. He leaned over and stifled it against his shoulder, but the muffled sound echoed in the stone passage. Something rippled in reaction — an echo, it seemed, and then the space in front of him exploded, black shards flying at him.

  Not shards but bats. Thousands of them.

  Dean pressed his head against the floor of the passageway, the air vibrating around him as bat after bat flew by. One hit his head and he felt another and another tripping over his back, their cries rattling his ears. Eyes closed, Dean pressed himself against the stone, waiting for the onrush to end.

  When the bats were gone, he pushed forward into a large cavern whose floor was covered with mounds of guano. Dean’s stomach began to turn. As he clamped his hand against his mouth and nose, he heard the ripple of wings again. He ducked to the right, squatting over a mound of bat turds as the mass of bats came back, circling the interior of the vast chamber before returning to their roosts in the ceiling.

  “Where the hell am I, Rockman?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out, Charlie. Stay where you are.”

  “There are bats here.”

  “You’re not freaked by bats, are you, Charlie?”

  Dean wished nothing less than to have Rockman’s neck within reach.

  “Mr. Dean, this is Rubens. It would appear that Red Lion and his people are within a complex of Byzantine tombs about a hundred feet from you. It appears that the metal lining the sarcophagi is jamming the transmission. However, the technicians believe that if you set up the booster unit close enough, they will be able to pick up some of the signal.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “No, I am not. If you believe it’s too risky to proceed, please say so.”

  Dean scanned the bat-filled cavern. How much worse could it be?

  “Which way do I go?” he said.

  “Straight ahead,” said Rockman.

  “Figures.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Asad leaned back, trying to stretch his legs without getting up. Three men had joined the al-Qaeda leader in the small, underground burial chamber; they huddled knee to knee on the rug Katib had set out before going back to join the rest of the bodyguards.

  More than a thousand years ago, rich Christians in the Byzantine empire had built this room and the surrounding crypts as a place to remember their dead. The thick bronze and other metals would make it impossible for radio waves to penetrate, lessening the chance that the Turks — or the Americans, who were their masters — would find a way to listen in. This was his only meeting in Istanbul where such precautions were necessary, and in truth Asad realized they were extreme even in this case. But he could not resist the symbolism of meeting here to plan the West’s funeral. Nor could he resist the opportunity to lecture his followers.

  “The first stage of our war has been largely symbolic,” he told the two men who had come to see him. “The martyrs struck at the heart of Western arrogance and power on 9/11. The crusaders struck back in a way that made our battle explicit. Each day, hundreds of brothers join our ranks — in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Egypt, in Spain, in France — in America itself. Now the time has come to move our attacks beyond symbolism. We prepare the war to strike at the economic heart of the corrupt barbarians who enslave us. We will strike at that lifeblood.”

  “With God’s help,” said the man on his right, a tall African brother from Somalia.

  “And yours, sheik,” said the other. Shorter, he was a light-skinned Libyan.

  “The ship?” he asked them.

  “It will arrive at the rendezvous point within a few hours,” said the Somalian. “Everything is prepared. Even the papers, if it is stopped.”

  Asad nodded. The American project was a complicated plan, involving three different stages; the preparation of the Aztec Exact represented only the first. The last would be most difficult and required him to travel to America to initiate it — a task he welcomed with relish. Asad would personally set the keystone attack in motion; the honor was his right as commander.

  “We are ready to do more, sheik,” said the African. “Say the word, a thousand brothers will join you.”

  “For now, you have done enough. There will be other chances in the future.” He bowed his head. “Let us pray before we go.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Dean was less than ten feet from the area with the burial vaults when Rockman told him they had finally picked up the signal. Dean put the booster on the side of the passage and began backing up. He got only a few yards when he heard voices in the space ahead.

  “Charlie, they’re coming in your direction,” said Rockman.

  No kidding, thought Dean. He stopped moving, lying silent in the square hole, his chin in the drain inset that ran along the floor. The voices and footsteps echoed wildly, the sounds a bizarre mix of growls. As he lay in the ancient sewer pipe, Dean felt his sweat
rolling down from his back. He felt his breath growing short and choppy; his head began to pound.

  I’ll be out soon, he told himself. Just hang on.

  When he didn’t hear any more sounds, Dean started to back up again. But he hadn’t gone more than three feet when he heard more voices. He stopped, lying flat in his sweat and the dank slime.

  “Asad’s coming out now,” said Rockman. “We think he’s the last to leave.”

  Dean tried to control his breath. His head had begun to pound fiercely.

  “He’s out,” said Rockman. “Give it a minute or two, make sure they’re all gone. Then go. Leave the booster unit.”

  Dean began pushing back immediately, fighting off the dread surging through him.

  He’d never been claustrophobic. Neither was he given to panic attacks. But damn if it didn’t seem like he was having one now.

  “Mr. Dean, this is Rubens again. Do you think you could scout the mausoleum area? We’d like to get an idea of what’s there.”

  “Sure,” said Dean. “Give me a minute.”

  * * *

  Lia followed Sandy Chafetz’s directions, methodically planting video devices along the road that led out of the palace. As she walked out of the main entrance, she spotted two men in black business suits standing next to a brown SUV. She passed them, then stopped to examine some of the evil eye charms being sold by a man with a small table near the Byzantine church’s wall.

  “I think I found one of the cars of someone at the meeting,” said Lia. “Want me to stick a tracker on it?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Two guards watching it.”

  “Get the license plate and ID it for Tommy,” Chafetz told her. “We’ll check it out. We need you to get one more video bug up by the intersection near Haghia Sophia, then go down the hill and get some to cover the lot the tour buses use to leave.”