Joshuas Hammer km-8

by David Hagberg

  Nafeh glared at him. “See that you do a better job dismantling the operation. We won’t accept another excuse. Perhaps you will find that you’re expendable too.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Now leave us. Your business here is finished, and I have other matters to discuss with Osama.”

  Bahmad got to his feet, his eyes locking with bin Laden’s.

  “Do you understand everything that you must do?” bin Laden asked.

  “Completely.”

  Bin Laden nodded. “My faith goes with you. Insha’Allah.”

  New York City

  Bahmad’s flight from Paris touched down at Kennedy about 11:00 p.m.” and by the time he had retrieved his bags, cleared customs and caught a cab to the Hudson River boatyard it was midnight. There were lights on in the forward cabins and in the main saloon of Papa’s Fancy, and he saw a shadow pass a window. He stood in the darkness just beyond the end of the dock to watch.

  There was no one around this late, and had there been he would have avoided them. He’d come back only to pick up the things he’d left aboard before heading out to California.

  Now this.

  He hadn’t spent enough time at this boatyard to recognize the few cars that were parked in the lot, but none of them was obviously a government vehicle. Nor did he think that whoever was aboard the yacht was a burglar. No, it was probably one of the crew who’d returned to check on the yacht, or to pick up something that they might have left behind.

  On the surface of it, that was just fine, except for one detail. If whoever was aboard at this moment had returned because they were suspicious of Bahmad and were going through his things it could mean trouble.

  He had portrayed himself as an independently wealthy international businessman and playboy. But the aluminum case in his stateroom contained weapons and other devices; not things that an ordinary businessman would carry.

  He considered turning around and leaving without his things. There was very little in his stateroom, except for the remote control detonating device, that he could not easily replace. Yet most of it was illegal under American law. And the nature of the equipment would raise some red flags with the FBI and CIA, because much of it could be traced to similar sources of the equipment in the van.

  He had to weigh that possibility against the fact that the yacht’s owner had secret business dealings with bin Laden and with the Islamic jihad. He had given up the boat for Bahmad’s use without hesitation and without so much as a single question. Perhaps the crew had been briefed to ask no questions either, and to do nothing except what they were told to do. Even if they found the case and opened it they might do nothing.

  Bahmad decided that he could not afford to take that risk. For all practical purposes he was now working on his own, independent not only of the movement, but of bin Laden, whose hands were completely tied. If Bahmad ran into trouble he would have to deal with the problem himself. Whatever resources he needed Would have to come from his own connections, as would the extra manpower if and when he needed it.

  Which meant he could not make any more mistakes like he had in Chevy Chase, nor could he leave any clues. Or witnesses.

  For a moment he was back in Beirut as a child with his parents; happy and safe, feelings that he’d not experienced since their deaths at the hands of the Israelis. From that moment he had, in effect, become a loner. He believed in no one, trusted in no one, and most importantly, depended on no one for help.

  This was nothing new to him.

  Hefting his bags he walked out onto the dock, making no effort at stealth. The gate at the head of the yacht’s boarding ladder was open, and when he stood on the deck he stopped to listen. There were no sounds from within the boat. They were connected to shore power, so the generators to power the lights weren’t running, but neither was the air conditioner. The night was warm. Whoever was aboard was not planning on staying for long, yet they weren’t afraid of showing lights.

  Bahmad went aft and entered the warm, stuffy saloon from the party deck as Captain Web Walker came from the forward part of the yacht. He wore civilian clothes; deck shoes, khaki trousers and a short-sleeved white Polo shirt with Papa’s Fancy embroidered on the pocket. He seemed nervous about something.

  “You’re back,” he said. “I thought I heard someone come aboard.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” Bahmad said pleasantly.

  “I came down for the week, so I thought that I’d check on things. Are you going to need the yacht? Shall I recall the crew?”

  “Not for ten days, maybe a little longer,” Bahmad told him. He put down his bags and went behind the bar where he poured a cognac. “Care for a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” Walker said. “Everything’s fine here, so I’ll be going.”

  “A moment, if you would, Captain,” Bahmad said mildly. It was obvious that Walker was lying. “Did the owner tell you why he wanted you to check on the yacht tonight?”

  The captain was a distinguished man, but he looked like a deer caught in headlights. He wanted to bolt, but he was rooted to the spot. “As I said, I happened to be in the city.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all of that, but the owner did ask you to check on things, didn’t he?” Bahmad kept his tone friendly. A couple of yachtsmen discussing a simple fact.

  “He gets nervous when no one is aboard to watch over things.”

  “I don’t blame him.” Bahmad put his glass down and came around the bar. “Did he tell you what you were supposed to be looking for?”

  The captain tried to smile. “Primarily that the vessel hadn’t sunk at the dock,” he said. “It’s happened to other boats.”

  “For which the captain would take the blame.”

  “Naturally.”

  “As he would take the blame if there was contraband aboard.” Bahmad laid a hand on Walker’s shoulder. “Drugs, maybe booze. Something that we might have picked up in Bermuda and didn’t declare when we came back.”

  “No one is worried about anything like that.”

  “Weapons then. Guns with silencers and hollowpoint bullets.”

  The captain swallowed.

  “So, you came back on the owner’s orders to search my stateroom. You found the case and you opened it. The question is who did you call? The FBI?”

  The captain backed up. “I just got here, I haven’t called anyone—” He realized his mistake and clamped his mouth shut.

  Bahmad smiled again. “What did you take?”

  “Nothing, I swear to God.”

  Bahmad turned him around and roughly shoved him up against the bulkhead. “Hands on the wall, feet spread.”

  “What the hell is this all about?”

  “Do it.” Bahmad gave him a shot in the ribs, and the captain grunted as if he’d been struck by a sledgehammer, but he did as he was told.

  Bahmad quickly frisked him, but came up with nothing except the captain’s wallet, some money, keys, handkerchief, comb, glasses and penknife.” “What did you take?” he asked again.

  “Nothing—”

  Bahmad drove his fist into the same spot in Walker’s side. The man cried out in pain and his knees started to buckle. “What did you take?”

  “I tossed the case over the side. I swear to God it’s at the bottom of the slip.”

  Bahmad was surprised. It wasn’t what he had expected. “Why?”

  “I was told to do it before you got back.”

  There it was — the answer. Someone from Nafeh’s staff had called the yacht’s owner and asked that Bahmad’s weapons be found and destroyed. They were fools. He didn’t need the equipment. Not even the remote detonator because the weapon could be manually set to fire from the keypad with as long as a twenty-four-hour delay.

  “Then what?” Bahmad asked, though he didn’t care what the answer would be, he was merely distracting the captain for one necessary moment.

  He shoved Walker flat against the bulkhead with his left hip, then grabbed the man’s head with
both hands and twisted it sharply backward and to the right. The captain’s neck broke with an audible pop.

  Bahmad let go and stepped back, allowing Walker to slump to the floor. The captain’s legs twitched, and his eyes blinked furiously as his face turned purple. Bahmad thought it was funny and he smiled. Killing a man this way was silent, but it took a good bit of time. Not only was his spinal cord severed, but his windpipe was crushed so that his airway was cut off at the same time his heart stopped.

  After a while the captain stopped twitching and Bahmad set about wiping down everything he had touched with his bare hands and searching the yacht for anything incriminating. He thought about finding the yacht’s diving gear and retrieving his equipment, but that would take too much time, not only to find it and bring it up, but to clean it and dry it all off. He decided to leave it at the bottom of the harbor. The captain’s body would be found sooner or later, but he didn’t think that anyone would go diving beneath the boat until it was too late to make a difference. He would get new weapons.

  He would get a hotel room tonight and in the morning he would fetch his things from storage and catch the early flight to Los Angeles. Just a few more days now and he would be free. He found that he was looking forward to his retirement with a great deal of relish.

  Aboard Air Force One

  “How are you doing, sweetheart?” President Haynes asked his daughter.

  She looked up, a sweet smile on her face. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “The clouds look like castles this morning.”

  Haynes looked out the window. They were over Iowa enroute to San Diego at about 30,000 feet, and the cloud formations did indeed look like castles. Like the one at Disneyland where they were going tomorrow. The International Special Olympics’ opening ceremony was three days from now, and Haynes was making a sweep through California in support of Governor S. Howard Thomas who was up for reelection in November. It was going to be a hot contest with a lot of major issues, not the least of which was abortion, which Haynes was against, but had to support publicly because of his party’s position; a ban on smoking in all public places including beaches, parks and even streets, something he thought made some sort of sense but was a ridiculous infringement of people’s freedoms by a heavy-handed government; and the elimination of the state income tax, even while Florida was grappling with the creation of a state income tax and Haynes himself was proposing the end of federal income taxes in favor of a flat-rate sales tax. Whatever position he took, there would be a hundred different voices opposing it, five dozen powerful lobbyist groups clamoring to get the attention of Congress and at least twenty talking heads on weekend morning television analyzing and dissecting every single move he and every other politician made. And it brought a smile to his face. This was what American politics was all about. The almost constant bickering, the dissentients, the name-calling and sometimes even mudslinging, the attempts at bribery and influence-peddling, the investigations and sometimes even impeachment proceedings; the give and take of compromise. All of it was working exactly the way the designers of the system had meant it to work. There was no dissolving of Congress or of the government, no tanks coming up Pennsylvania Avenue in another military coup, no President and his cabinet fleeing the country, no armed revolution pitting one people against another, leastways not since the Civil War.

  “The clouds do look like castles Haynes said. He looked into his daughter’s eyes. She seemed very happy. “Are you looking forward to the Olympics this weekend, sweetheart?” She was always so open and straightforward that he could tell what she was thinking and how she was feeling.

  “I’m nervous, but I was thinking about something,” she replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just about everybody else is going to be just as nervous as me. Mom says all I can do is my best and don’t worry about anyone else, ‘cause they’ll be trying to do their best. I hope. But I’m still nervous. Is it okay?”

  Haynes glanced up as his chief of staff Tony Lang came around the corner. He looked nervous. Everybody aboard did. Haynes gave his daughter a peck on the cheek. “It’s okay to be nervous, but not scared.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then nodded, her pretty blue eyes lighting up and a smile brightening an already impossibly bright face. “Gotcha.” She looked like a cross between a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian beauty and a mysterious, almond-eyed Siberian.

  Haynes studied his daughter’s round face for a moment, and his heart suddenly hardened. God help the sorry sonofabitch who ever tried to harm so much as a hair on her head. He felt a genuine sorrow and guilt for what had happened to bin Laden’s daughter. He wished that he could somehow make it right, or at least explain to bin Laden how it had happened. But he could not. What he could do was protect his own child, while at the same time protect the freedom of the United States.

  “Gotta go,” he said, but his daughter was already looking out the window again. She could grasp some fairly complex ideas, but usually not more than one of them at a time. She was in some ways lucky, he thought.

  He joined Lang and they went forward into the corridor separating the family’s space with the President’s private study and conference room.

  “Henry would like to go over a few things with you, Mr. President, and Sterling wants to know if you’ll agree to an off-the-record chat with the media sometime this afternoon before we touch down.”

  “Tell Henry to come up, and I want you to sit in on it too, because I have a few ideas — assuming he’s talking about security for the games in San Francisco.”

  Lang nodded. “He’s running into some brick walls, and he’s probably going to ask you to pull your daughter out of the ISO.”

  Haynes’s jaw tightened. “Not a chance. And you can tell Sterling that I’ll talk to the media, but the issues will be limited.”

  “Anything but the games?” Lang asked.

  “That’s right,” Haynes said angrily. He went forward, pausing at the open curtain to his wife’s office. She was in conference with her press secretary and they looked up and smiled.

  “Did you talk to Deb?” his wife asked.

  “Just now. She’s a little nervous, but she’ll be okay.”

  “Would you like me to come back later, Mrs. Haynes?” the First Lady’s secretary asked, starting to rise.

  The President waved her back. “No. Henry wants to go over the arrangements for San Francisco, so I’ve just got a minute.”

  “Are we going to be okay up there?” The President’s wife asked.

  “We’re going to make it okay, Linda, by covering all the bases, not by hiding,” the President told her firmly. He held her eye for a moment, and a silent message of reassurance passed from him to her. She visibly relaxed. “I wouldn’t take the games away from her for anything.”

  “It’s been two months and nothing has happened,” she said. “Do you want me to touch on it in my talks?”

  Haynes thought about it and nodded. “It might not be a bad idea. But use a light touch, and maybe you’d better run it past Marty.” Martin Schoenberg was the President’s chief speech writer.

  “Sure.”

  The President went to his conference room. He pressed the button for his steward, who appeared instantly. “How about some coffee, Alex?”

  “Coming right up, sir.”

  Haynes was in shirtsleeves; not as informal as Clinton had been, but a lot less tense than Nixon. He set a hardworking but relaxed tone in his administration, and the people he’d gathered around him thrived in the atmosphere.

  His coffee came in a large mug bearing the presidential seal, and a moment later Lang showed up with Kolesnik.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” the chief of the Secret Service Protective Division said.

  “Morning, Henry. Tony said you had something for me.”

  “Yes, sir, but I’m afraid that it’s not very, good news. San Francisco is a mess. There’s just no way that we can guarantee your safety or that of your daughter in
the games. It’s as simple as that. We’d like you to pull your daughter out and cancel your part in the opening ceremonies.”

  “We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

  “Sir, a lot of those athletes are coming from Muslim countries. Their families are coming with their moms, dads, brothers, uncles. At least men who claim to be brothers and uncles. And there’s just no way we can check all of them. If bin Laden wanted to send an army to San Francisco, he could do it easily.”

  “But he’s not going to do that”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but we can’t be sure,” Kolesnik countered. He handed the President a list of all the Special Olympians expected for the games. “There’re nearly three thousand of them, plus relatives or guardians and coaches. At least four hundred are Muslims. But that’s not the worst of it. Bin Laden has supporters just about everywhere, which means that the assassin or assassins could be German or Italian, or Japanese, even American.”

  The President flipped through the lengthy list, knowing exactly who these people were. Down syndrome runners, paraplegic swimmers, blind discus throwers, palsied high jumpers; athletes with dozens of afflictions doing the best they could. “That’s exactly why bin Laden won’t make his strike in San Francisco. He’d be killing Muslims. His own people. He’d never survive such an attack.”

  “In a strange way, Mr. President, you may be wrong for all the right reasons,” Kolesnik said. “By killing his own people he would be sending a very clear message that absolutely no one is safe from him. It could dramatically increase his stature and that of the NIF, if anyone can follow such logic.”

  “Well, I for one cannot.”

  “The psychologists on our staff brought it up as a possibility, sir.” Kolesnik was frustrated, but it was clear that he’d expected to run into a brick wall. “If it came to that, Mr. President, the Secret Service could supersede your orders.” Under certain circumstances in which the President’s life was clearly in danger, the Secret Service did have the power to override a President’s wishes, even by gentle force if necessary, and take him out of harm’s way.

  “Don’t even try to go there, Henry,” Haynes warned.