Night of the Cobra

by Jack Coughlin

  “No, sir. Street cops are out in the neighborhoods, staying visible and talking to a lot of people. So far, things seem cordial, but my sources say the Somalis are worried.”

  “I hear you.” He slid an arm into his coat. “Man, this city is on edge. Can’t you just feel it?”

  His desk phone rang, and Brooks was tempted not to answer it, but he did. His face paled as he listened, and he hung up the receiver as if it were made of delicate glass, then looked at the three other people in the room. “A bomb just flipped a Metro Transit bus outside the Target Center after the basketball game. All three of you get over there. Move!”

  Janna and Lucky were already heading for the door. Kyle fell in with them. Brooks hung his jacket back on the hook. He would be in his office all night long.

  20

  CALLS

  MIDNIGHT

  CLIVE WILCOX WAS UP to his ass in alligators at the Twin Cities Call, a weekly alternative newspaper. His midnight deadline for the new edition was fast approaching, and the managing editor had everything in place. The Call had no mention of the terrorism threat because it could not compete with the big media. Instead, his lead story was about a toxic-chemicals-dumping case. The little newspaper had built its reputation on such material, and the publisher’s formula was to surround a few offbeat stories with advertisements for everything from rock bands to yoga classes and columns of extremely personal ads. In the age of electronics, the little weekly was still kicking.

  He was alone in the small newsroom on the second floor of a rented building. The place was a mess, and, with the windows closed against the outside cold, it stank. His shirt smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. His telephone chimed with his Superman theme ringtone. “Wilcox,” he snapped.

  “God is great!” shouted an anonymous voice.

  “Whatta you want? I’m right on deadline.”

  The caller was almost yelling. “We are responsible for the bomb.”

  Clive automatically grabbed a pen and a piece of scrap paper. He didn’t know from any bomb. “What bomb?”

  “The bus at the Target Center, ten minutes ago.”

  Clive had not had either television set on, and his computer and his mind had both been clogged with finishing off the Call edition, but he was still a reporter. “Yeah. And?”

  “God is great!” the caller shouted even louder.

  “You said that already. Who are you? I mean, if you’re claiming responsibility, I need to know who you are.” Clive tried to force himself to stay calm, but was writing furiously. This might be real, and if it was, then maybe it was his ticket out of the weekly ranks.

  “We are al Shabaab! A note that explains everything is in an envelope downstairs in your mail receptacle. God is great!” The phone clicked off.

  Man, Wilcox thought, putting down the receiver, this was old-school Woodward and Bernstein stuff. He hurried down to the lobby and found a brown envelope on the tile beneath the mail slot. He ripped the top and slid out a note that had been written on an old typewriter. It announced that a martyr, naming some Arab guy, was a member of al Shabaab and had successfully carried out the attack on America. Several paragraphs followed, gibberish about jihad and freedom fighters.

  Wilcox ran upstairs, where the front page of the weekly newspaper was still on his screen, about to be transmitted over to the printer’s shop for the overnight run. The weekly probably had been chosen simply as a cutout so the note could not be tracked by the cops. Was it even true? Just because the claim was made did not mean someone actually had cooked off a bomb downtown.

  He scrambled for the remote under some paper and clicked on the television set. A camera crew that had been covering the basketball game had gotten to the scene and was showing the carnage in graphic detail as some TV guy stood out in the cold with a microphone.

  Bomb! The publisher was going to be pissed, but Clive Wilcox could not hold this until next week. He tore out the toxic-dumping report, then pounded a replacement story about how the Call was the first to know who set off the explosive and reprinted the content of the note. Once he transmitted the edition, twenty minutes late, he telephoned the police.

  FRIDAY MORNING

  Omar Jama was at the breakfast table in the big house on the hill, nibbling on fruit and buttered toast and drinking hot tea, feeling like a lord in a castle, better than he had in weeks. Six months ago, his nerves had been stretched, his brain jangled, and worry had plagued his hours, for a hundred thousand things might have gone wrong during the final planning of this intricate operation. Instead, a handful of things had all gone right, and here he sat, safe in a beautiful American home that was so large it even had a special room just for breakfast. He was able to laugh at those past concerns. Everything was working.

  The news reports were frantic. Almost twenty Americans had been killed by the bomb blast at the Target Center, and at least fifty were injured. Some of those would die, too. The victims of the multiple attacks were adding up.

  Gruesome images were flung across the screen, accompanied by banner crawls and excited proclamations that terrorists were attacking. It was 9/11 all over again! It was exactly how the Cobra had mapped it out, long before he had even arrived in the United States.

  The planning had been carried out in the tightest possible secrecy and with the greatest possible care, for the Cobra was fighting this war on a shoestring. In the heyday of al Qaeda, operational funding came from the very deep pockets of Osama bin Laden and his many admirers. They had found many men willing to die for the cause and had enough cash to spread it around to other terrorist groups. After the United States killed Osama, the easy money dried up, and it was every organization for itself.

  The line of credit from Prince Faisal in Greece was the Cobra’s only source of income, and he had discovered that a million dollars did not really go very far. He had tried to work with the pirates of Somalia who captured and ransomed cargo ships, but when the world’s navies had effectively blocked most of that enterprise, he discovered that the pirates could not be trusted. They were dishonest, and did not fear him.

  Years of banking sanctions by America and European nations had similarly crippled terrorist cash flow.

  That would all change when he finished his American trip. Then the money would once again roll in, along with the fame and the arms and military power he needed. He would override the chest-thumping usurpers and their ragtag groups that popped up periodically in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and stayed busy killing each other in eternal religious squabbles. Some gained temporary notoriety and promised to attack America, but the Cobra was the only one who had actually done so. He would be the one who would be hailed throughout the Muslim world as the reincarnation of Osama.

  The Cobra went to a bathroom and washed his hands and face, avoiding the mirror. He already knew what he looked like. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he was overjoyed by his train of successes thus far. By his continual pushing and pushing, the Americans were now overreacting, just as he had anticipated, and it was time to unleash the final phase, then flee this humbled country, leaving it much worse than it had been when he first entered.

  It was also time for him to begin attending to the secondary goals: the personal business. Unlike the primary mission, these had not been planned in detail because he thought that he could squeeze them into the more important timetable. He had never lost his hatred for the three people who had beaten him in Somalia and put him in that fetid Kenyan prison, and his spies had done good work. If he could not kill them this time, then he would kill them later, but kill them he would.

  He stayed in the deep background for the major attacks. His victims and the police did not know who he was. But for the personal hits, he intended to unmask himself before the victims went down. They had to see him. They had to know who was killing them. First on his private list would be the easiest target, the troublesome woman Deqo Sharif, who had once fractured his skull with an iron pot.

  A fresh prepaid mob
ile phone that Hassan had purchased in California for this one task was in his traveling kit, and he dug it out. The only number was preprogrammed and the call was answered by a producer at a local television station. The Cobra provided an anonymous tip that the terrorist mastermind behind all of this recent terrible violence was being sheltered right here in Minneapolis, at this very moment, in the home of an al Shabaab sympathizer. He recited the address and then terminated the call, which had lasted less than ten seconds, and destroyed the telephone.

  FRIDAY MORNING

  The bus-blast scene was horrific, although Kyle Swanson had seen worse. Actual war and a relatively small terrorist attack differed on too many levels to count. The one that came to his mind first was the hellish scene on Highway 80 heading north from Kuwait and into Iraq, where convoys of the Iraqi occupation army had been annihilated by air power. His memories of patrolling up that six-lane highway of death, walking among countless dismembered human remains and the carcasses of vehicles, helped keep his reactions in check. Here, one crazy suicide bomber had blown up a bus partially filled with civilians. It was a tragedy, but a poor comparison.

  Lucky Sharif carried a similar personal frame of reference from his childhood in Somalia. He had grown up in a place where dead bodies were found in the streets every morning and entire villages were laid to waste, along with all of their inhabitants. Swanson and Sharif looked at the bus-explosion scene through the dispassionate eyes of seasoned professionals.

  Both of them, along with Janna Ecklund and much of the available law enforcement apparatus in the city, stayed at the crime scene for hours. An emergency command post had been established inside the Target Center, out of the weather. Swanson hung around, watching, but the CIA had no role in this investigation. He kept in touch with Marty Atkins in Washington, who promised the agency admin team was in the air, heading to Minnesota as fast as possible.

  Swanson avoided anyone that might be a member of the media and did not go near the Friday-morning press conference, where a spokesman announced the note left at the office of a weekly newspaper. The terrorist group known as al Shabaab was claiming responsibility.

  Instead, he called to check on Deqo, but there was no answer.

  “She’s probably out in the neighborhood,” said Lucky. He called the resettlement center, but she wasn’t there, either. “I’m sure that she’s out walking around, keeping a lid on things.”

  Lucky was stuck at the command center, but Ecklund was free to drive Swanson over to the house and check on her.

  As she steered the big sedan through traffic, Kyle asked, “What’s with your all-arctic look, Janna? Every other female FBI agent I’ve ever seen tries to blend in with the male agents. You blend with polar bears.”

  She gave a look, then laughed. Kyle had no sense of propriety. “Oh, I wore the dark pantsuits and skirts and jackets for a few years. Then I started taking liberties with the dress code. God, I’m a six-foot-tall Scandinavian, so I decided to be distinctive and use it to my advantage. Actually, I blend pretty well with most of the people in this neck of the country.”

  “By scaring the hell out of insecure little men?”

  There was a nod and a smile. “That’s their problem, not mine.” She had perfect white teeth, of course, but the mouth settled into a tight line as she drove. She waited for the inevitable question about whether she and Lucky were a couple, but it didn’t come. Kyle had eyes, and nobody was hiding anything.

  In the light of day, Minneapolis and St. Paul had assumed the look of cities under siege. It was not martial law, but it was getting close. Security around important buildings was doubled, checkpoints and barricades went up at vital infrastructure facilities, and police roamed in heavy vehicles.

  Swanson shifted in his seat, uncomfortable and feeling as if they were driving into a combat zone. He saw cops with sniper rifles and even one manning a .30 caliber machine gun atop a modified military-style Humvee. “I don’t like all of the firepower out there,” he said.

  “No. It looks weird.” Something had happened to the peaceful equilibrium of the city. Cops, many wearing helmets, combat boots, and bulky body armor that was festooned with military-style gear, all straps and buckles, were roaming in herds and holding automatic rifles across their chests with slings. Others carried plexiglass shields and riot batons and were ordering—not asking—people to stay in their homes. Some of the vehicles shook the streets as they rolled through on giant bulletproof tires. In all, the picture was one of fear instead of confidence. Two mass shootings and a deadly bomb explosion, with lots of death, had silenced those who would normally speak out against such a show of strength.

  The uniformed presence grew stronger as Kyle and Janna neared the Somali neighborhoods, for SWAT and sheriff’s-office tactical units were concentrating in the Cedar-Riverside area. Two blocks away from Deqo’s house, they hit a dead end.

  21

  THE RAID

  FRIDAY NOON

  CEDAR-RIVERSIDE AREA

  THE FBI SEDAN WAS blocked at an intersection where two cop cars nuzzled against a waist-high barrier, and beyond that was parked the hulking goliath of the police arsenal, an eighteen-ton mine-resistant, ambush-protected, military-style chunk of armored vehicle known as a MaxxPro. The MRAP was ten feet tall, and standing in the turret was a scowling policeman in full armor pointing an automatic M-16 rifle toward the gathering crowd and oncoming vehicles. The behemoth war wagon had a new paint job, police decals, and emergency lights but was a terrifying presence, and the camera crew of a television truck gobbled up the scene as a reporter spoke breathlessly of imminent danger.

  All the cops were in total camouflage and looked like brown bushes in the urban landscape. One pointed his finger at Janna and signaled a full stop by holding his left hand high. The right palm rested close to his holstered pistol. More cops in battle gear moved to box the car into place. All had AR-15 rifles dangling from load-bearing web harnesses.

  “You ready for this shit, Kyle?” she asked, and her voice had steel in it. Swanson nodded that he was.

  She tapped her siren and turned on the flashers. That made the cops twitch and the TV producer curse about the noise that drowned out the live reporter. The window hummed down, and Janna badged the cop and said, “What the fuck, Jack?”

  Kyle lifted his own creds to show the cops on the other side. Too tight, he thought. Nervous. Bad ju-ju.

  “Sorry, ma’am, but nobody can drive through down there right now.” Despite the overwhelming power at his disposal, the cop looked like a mouse who had wandered up to the wrong cat.

  “Officer, I’m Special Agent Janna Ecklund of the FBI and I will go anywhere I fucking please. What’s so important that you guys are building a fort on a city street and pointing guns at civilians? Who’s shooting at you?”

  “Ma’am. We received credible information that a terrorist boss is hiding down there. A two-block area has been sealed while we conduct a house-to-house search. Nobody in, nobody out, no exceptions.”

  Janna’s icy eyes flared. “Jesus Christ! And you have the warrants to do that?”

  “That’s above my pay grade, ma’am. In the meantime, we are asking for cooperation from the residents as we flood the neighborhood with cops. They understand that we are trying to protect them from a killer.”

  Janna was out of the car now, bigger than the cop and leaning toward him in anger. She had left the siren screaming so the TVs could not overhear them. “And if someone doesn’t want to open the door? What, you’re kicking it in?”

  “I’m following orders, Special Agent Ecklund,” the cop said. “Things are critical here.”

  “I just left the FBI office, and we didn’t know anything about this.” She pointed to the television people. “And why are those ghouls right up next to you cops, or are you soldiers now? They’re broadcasting live.”

  The policeman stood his ground, tired of being battered by this woman. “You are blocking an operational position. Please get back into your car a
nd move it.”

  Instead, Janna turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. The siren whimpered off. “Oh, hell no, Bubba. I’m standing right here and calling my boss, who will have an assistant U.S. attorney general on the horn in about thirty seconds. You are way over your head on constitutional issues here, Officer, particularly on Fourth Amendment rights. Whoever ordered this little show has made a monstrous mistake.”

  “That’s bullshit, Agent Ecklund. Our lawyers clear all of that stuff.”

  She spat the exact words. “‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’ That’s the exact wording. You don’t have that. So you guys are tromping all over a constitutional guarantee. This isn’t Baghdad. Take my advice and back off.”

  The cop looked across the roof of the car as Swanson pushed open his door, taking in the scene. He yelled, “You! Back in the car! Keep your hands up!”

  The closest officer took a step forward and gripped the pistol in his side holster. Kyle stared the kid down and badged him. “I’m with the CIA, and I have legitimate business here. I am going to walk through this barricade, right past your silly fuckin’ MRAP, and it would be best for you to quit thinking about trying to stop me.” His voice was hard, and he opened his jacket to show his own heavy Colt .45 that was on his hip. “If you try, I will shoot you. Move aside.”

  Janna Ecklund called over. “He will do it, too, Officer. After he finishes, I will arrest what’s left of you.” She turned back to the first cop and lowered her voice to a more reasonable tone. “Somebody issued faulty orders here, Officer, and a legal shit-storm is coming your way as soon as I make that call. Hell, I don’t even have to bother, because that television crew has already let the powers that be know what has happened. The scramble has already started. This is your last chance, or I will bring formal charges against you personally for interfering with federal officers in the performance of their duties. Start thinking about ten years in a supermax. Just like my partner, I am not kidding. Stand down.”