Joshuas Hammer km-8

by David Hagberg

  Chevy Chase

  The dark blue van obviously didn’t belong parked on the street across from Kathleen McGarvey’s country club home.

  Driving past, careful to keep his speed normal, his eyes straight ahead, Bahmad spotted a dark figure waiting behind the wheel. He had to consider the possibility that the CIA had placed a guard on the woman, which meant that they might be expecting an act of retaliation by bin Laden. It complicated his plans, but not impossibly so. Not yet. He still had time.

  At the end of the block he turned right and headed back to Constitution Avenue. The logical thing to do was return to the yacht for a few days, then sail out to Bermuda, or up to Maine and Canada, waste time conspicuously, as planned. Be seen and yet not be seen for what he really was. Get his name in the society columns, make friends, spend money. Become the wealthy international playboy, not bin Laden’s paid assassin.

  But he had promised that McGarvey’s daughter would die. The thought of killing her had a certain symmetry to it, considering Sarah’s death, and he had to admit that it excited him too. McGarvey had been an arrogant bastard. Killing his daughter and his wife would be interesting to say the least.

  Bahmad smiled his secret smile, and for a moment or two he wondered in one part of his brain if, like bin Laden, he too wasn’t losing his mind. There was a time as a child playing in the park near his house in Beirut when he’d led a life that could be considered normal. Although his memories of that time were hazy and imperfect now, he did remember that he had been a happy child.

  Elizabeth’s VW was not parked in the driveway of her mother’s house. Of course it could have been locked away out of sight in the garage, but that didn’t matter tonight. She would come to her mother to grieve and they would both die, as would the CIA officer on guard duty.

  But the timing would have to be right. For that he would need some additional help and equipment. Turning over a number of scenarios in his mind he drove by the entrance to the Chevy Chase Country Club, and as usual a plan came to him all in one piece; the moves and counter moves arranged in precise battle order like the pieces on a chessboard.

  Be seen, and yet not be seen. That was the technique that had allowed him to survive so long in this business. Driving back to the yacht he was actually looking forward to the party aboard tomorrow night. In a few days he would have the people he needed in place, and Captain Walker would have arranged a summer membership for him in the Chevy Chase Country Club, the fifteenth fairway of which abutted Kathleen McGarvey’s backyard.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

  The four men and five horses carrying the bomb had drifted through the mountains seemingly on the wind. Traveling day and night, their leader, Mustafa Binzagar, had allowed them to stop only briefly to eat and rest. They had worked their way a hundred sixty miles down the Panjshir Valley in less than four days, and Mustafa knew that when they delivered the package their journey would be ended in more than one sense of the word. The task that bin Laden had set them to do would be over, but so would their lives in Al Qaeda be finished. There were other training camps scattered around Afghanistan, but with bin Laden gone, and no new leader to replace him, their very existence would be meaningless. During the trek they had not seen another living soul, which gave Mustafa plenty of time to think about his predicament. But he had not come up with a solution. He was nothing but a mujahed, a lowly foot soldier with nowhere to go. No family who would accept him, no friends, and now no base or purpose.

  He stood at the edge of the last glacier before the border and looked down the sweeping valley into Pakistan. There was nothing to be seen in the pitch-black of the night except for an airport beacon, which because of the clear, thin mountain air reflected green and white off the glacial ice even at a distance of thirty kilometers. They had been instructed not to cross the border because they did not know the schedule of the Pakistani patrols. But he’d been given no orders beyond this point, except that they were to be met by two men who would use the words, Sarah lives in Allah’s mansion. He felt a sense of bitterness and even betrayal that in the excitement he’d forgotten to ask what came next.

  Hussein al-Rajhi came up the hill from where they’d tethered the horses and made a rough camp. “There’s enough wood for a small fire if you want some tea. Or should we save it until morning? It would help if we knew when they were coming.”

  “I don’t know,” Mustafa said dreamily. He had become mesmerized by the airport beacon on the horizon, and what the light represented.

  “Are you sure that we have come to the correct place?”

  Mustafa turned to him. “This is the tongue of the glacier, and that’s the airport at Chitral.” He took out one of his last cigarettes and lit it, cupping it in his hand so that the glowing tip would be invisible to anyone who might be watching from the valley. “Start the fire. I’m cold and I could use some tea.” He passed the cigarette to Hussein. “It won’t be long now, and we’ll be starting back.”

  “Where will we go—”

  “I don’t know, maybe Khost!” Mustafa said angrily. Hussein took a couple of drags and handed the cigarette back. He shot a glance toward the horses. “She was a woman beyond understanding.”

  Mustafa had to smile despite his morose mood. “That she was. Even her father had no control over her.”

  “But she was strong.”

  Mustafa shook his head thinking about her. “She might have eventually changed except for the American. He poisoned her. Mohammed told me everything.”

  Hussein nodded. He’d heard the stories too, about how the American had tried to rape her, and how Mohammed had gotten shot in the hand saving her. Infidels were beyond understanding. And in the end nothing any of them did could have saved her from the missiles. “Maybe we should stay with her. The rest of the way to Mecca.”

  Mustafa looked at him shrewdly. The idea was brilliant,

  and although it had never occurred to him, he felt now that it was a thought, like a word on the tip of the tongue, that would have come to him at any moment. “There might not be room for all of us on the airplane.”

  “The package is very heavy. It would take two men to handle it.”

  “Us?”

  Hussein nodded.

  Mustafa took out his pistol, checked the action and switched the safety off. Hussein did the same, and without another word they went down the hill where Is mail and Suleiman were tending to the horses. They looked up.

  “Are they coming?” Is mail asked.

  Mustafa raised his pistol and shot him in the face from a distance of less than two meters. Hussein, who had come up behind Suleiman, shot him in the back of the head at pointblank range. Both shots were muffled by the hillside.

  Suleiman was just eighteen and very strong. His legs were still twitching when Mustafa walked over. “Finish him.”

  Hussein bent over the mujahed and fired a shot directly into his temple. At that moment Mustafa fired one shot into the back of Hussein’s head, driving him forward, his body flopping down on Suleiman’s.

  Such a waste, he thought. But when there was only enough food on the table for one, it naturally belonged to the strongest man. There might not be room aboard the airplane for two men, but there certainly would be for one. And the package wasn’t that heavy after all.

  They were right on time for the rendezvous, but he’d not seen anyone coming up the hill from the east, so he figured he had at least a couple of hours to get his story straight about how the other three had turned around and gone, and do what was needed here.

  He loaded the bodies on three horses, and led them a couple of hundred meters back the way they had come, then dumped the bodies on the ground near a large pile of rocks. He tied the horses’ reins loosely over their necks, and slapped each on the rump, sending them racing into the night. They might go for several miles before circling back, but Mustafa figured by then he’d be long gone from here.

  He laid the three bodies on top
of each other and then started piling rocks on them. It was a difficult job and after a few minutes he was sweating heavily, but he worked without stopping until the bodies were completely covered and the arrangement of rocks looked reasonably natural. Unless someone looked close they would miss the grave.

  He headed back to the camp, lighting a cigarette, his next to the last, and let himself come down. The tough part was over. Now, no matter what happened, he had no one to worry about except himself. There was still time, he decided to make a small fire and brew some tea.

  He came over the last rise above the camp and stopped short. A man dressed in a Pakistani army uniform was reloading the package on one of the horses.

  Mustafa stepped back, his hand going to the pistol inside his vest, when someone came up from behind.

  “We wondered where you had gotten yourself to,” a man said in Dari.

  Mustafa swung around. This one wore a Pakistani army uniform with captain’s pips on his shoulder boards. He carried a pistol in a holster but made no move to draw it.

  “What are you doing on this side of the border?” Mustafa foolishly asked. “This is Afghanistan.”

  “We’re here on a mission of mercy.”

  Mustafa pulled out his gun. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’re here for Sarah,” the Pakistani captain said gently. “She lives in Allah’s mansion, and we’ve come to take her the rest of the way home.”

  Mustafa let the relief wash the tension from his body. He put his pistol away. “Good,” he said. “I sent the others back, I’m coming with you.”

  “There’s no room,” the captain said. “Besides, you have no papers.” He took out his pistol and shot Mustafa in the forehead, just above the bridge of his nose. “Foolish man,” he muttered half under his breath. By sending his three companions away the stupid mujahed had made a difficult task easy. Allah be praised. In three hours they would have the holy package aboard an airplane on its way to Karachi, their part of the mission completed in time for a couple hours of sleep before morning prayers. “Insha’Allah.”

  The White House

  It wasn’t until after four in the afternoon before Roland Murphy finally got over to the White House to brief the President. He had held off to give the NRO time to recheck their analysis, and to get some new photos from the next series of satellite passes, and for Rencke to make sure that they all understood exactly what they meant.

  The President was waiting for him in the Oval Office with his national security adviser Dennis Berndt, but no one else.

  “Bin Laden has survived,” Murphy told them without beating around the bush. He took a dozen enhanced photos out of his briefcase and spread them on the coffee table in front of them. Attached to the images were the computer generated identification probabilities which were nearly at one hundred percent.

  The news did not come as a complete surprise to them. Murphy had called two days ago to alert the President to the possibility. But now that it was confirmed Berndt was his usual disdainful self.

  “What the hell took so long, General?” he demanded.

  “I wanted to make absolutely sure first. I didn’t want to go off half-cocked. We have enough problems as it is.”

  “Are you finally sure now?” Berndt smirked. “No possibility that the CIA could be wrong … again?”

  “There’s always that possibility, Dennis,” Murphy said. “But being an ass won’t help the situation.”

  Berndt started to say something, but the President held him off. “So we missed again, and now he’s going to strike back, and I think we all know what that means.” The President gave Murphy a bleak look. “At least we got McGarvey out of there. Is he going to be okay?”

  “They’re releasing him from Ramstein sometime tonight. He should be back here in the morning,” Murphy said. “But he might not have the answers either.”

  “Is he fit to return to work?”

  “I haven’t talked to him yet, Mr. President, but I can’t imagine how I could stop him from coming back. He’s going to have plenty to say.”

  “It was just plain bad luck this time,” Berndt said.

  “No, Dennis, it was poor planning,” Murphy shot back. “If we had given Mac a little more time he would have come back with the deal we sent him over there to make. As it is now there’ll be no more talking. Bin Laden has got the bomb and he’s going to use it against us.”

  “You don’t know that for sure, General,” Berndt said, still trying to slip out of any responsibility. “Could be we did the right thing. Maybe this time we put the fear of God into bin Laden and he’s going to back off. Have your people taken the time to at least give that possibility a consideration. Let’s not close any doors here.”

  “That was discussed,” Murphy said. “But we discarded the idea as wishful thinking.”

  “I don’t see why,” Berndt said, turning to the President. “Maybe we should put out feelers through the Taliban government. Offer some sort of a reparation payment in exchange for getting word to bin Laden.”

  Murphy took several more photos out of his briefcase and spread them on top of those already on the coffee table. “That won’t work, Dennis, and this is why.” He was still having trouble accepting the young woman’s death. It was the worst thing that could have happened.

  “What’s this now?” Berndt asked. He’d lost a lot of his usual bluster. When he calmed down he was quite bright. The trouble was he was easily excited.

  “These are shots of bin Laden carrying a body across his camp minutes after the missile raid was over.”

  The President picked up one of the photographs and studied it for a long time. His shoulders seemed to sag. “Who is it?”

  “His daughter,” Murphy said softly. “Her name was Sarah. She was just nineteen years old.”

  The President closed his eyes for a moment. “You wouldn’t have brought these over if you weren’t sure about this too.” He looked up. “How did it happen?”

  “It looks as if she helped escort McGarvey out of the camp. She was coming back when the attack began, and she was caught out in the open.”

  The President’s eyes were drawn to the photograph of his daughter on the desk. “I never meant for that to happen,” he said softly.

  Murphy nodded. “It was a tragic accident, Mr. President, that none of us anticipated. But bin Laden will almost certainly strike back. Maybe even against you.”

  “He has the motivation now, if he never had it before,” the President agreed.

  “She was a terrorist who—” Berndt said, but the President cut him off with a withering glance.

  “She was just a baby girl, Dennis. Nineteen.” “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but accident or not, we cannot back down now. We’re going to have to go after the bastard with everything we have. The bounty hasn’t worked, and we’ll never know if McGarvey’s attempt to negotiate a solution would have worked — all that is too late now. We have to kill him. I don’t think there can be any argument about that now, can there be?”

  “How difficult would it be for us to arrest him?” the President asked. He was grasping at straws and Murphy could sympathize with him.

  “First we’d have to find him, and that in itself might present a big problem. The Taliban may have finally kicked him out of Afghanistan, and if that’s the case he could be almost anywhere.”

  “Khartoum,” Berndt suggested.

  “That would be my first guess,” Murphy conceded. “But even if we did find him, arresting him would be problematic. There would be casualties, possibly heavy casualties.”

  “Kill him,” Berndt said.

  Murphy eyed the national security adviser with all the more distaste because this time he had to go along with him, even though he didn’t agree. “That might be the only viable option.”

  The President got up and went to the bowed windows where he stretched his back. This was the first real test of his administration, and he was learning, as every other Pre
sident had, that there were never any easy answers, and that even the power of the United States was very limited.

  “Maybe the bomb is already here,” he said.

  “Mac didn’t think so.”

  “Would killing bin Laden stop someone else from using it against us? Does he have an heir apparent?”

  “We don’t think he is training anyone to take over, but of course we can’t be sure about that. What we do know is that he’s the one holding the organization together. Personal loyalty. He’s a hero to the Islamic peoples. They respect and trust him. When he’s gone the money will certainly dry up, and so will the contacts.”

  The President turned back. “Can we do it?”

  On the way over here Murphy had known that his briefing would probably come to this. But he no more had the answer now than he did an hour ago. “I don’t know, Mr. President.”

  “McGarvey got to him once, maybe he can figure out how to get to him again,” Berndt suggested.

  “It’s not that easy. Bin Laden wanted to be found. He wanted the meeting. This time it’ll be different. He’ll be expecting someone to come after him, so if we do something like this — assuming that we can find him in the first place — we’ll have to hit him very hard, but not with missiles-with ground troops. And most likely without the knowledge or consent of the local authorities.” Murphy shook his leonine head. “There’s a lot of room for disaster there, Mr. President.”

  “We’re not going to be held hostage by that sonofabitch like Carter was with the Iranians,” the President said forcefully. “I’m deeply sorry about his daughter, but he chose to keep her with him on the battlefield. And he chose to acquire a goddamn nuclear weapon and threaten us with it. His choices, General, every one of them. What does the CIA suggest we do about it?”

  “I’d very much like to see bin Laden dead, and the CIA will use all of its resources to that end even though it’s against the law and against national policy, if that’s what you want.”