Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  They stacked up at the door at the end: Clark, Jack, Chavez, and Caruso. Clark gestured: Two by two, right and left. Everyone nodded. Clark tried the knob, then turned and nodded. They pushed through the door, stepping right and left, guns tracking. Clark held up his fist-hold-then pointed at the lump under the covers on the bed. He then pointed at Chavez, then the closet. Ding checked it, shook his head.

  Clark padded up to the bed. Jack and Dominic took the end, and Ding the other side. All four trained their guns on the figure under the covers. Clark holstered his gun, then clicked on his LED penlight, grabbed the edge of the sheet, and jerked it back.

  “Shit,” he said.

  85

  KERSEN KASEKE left his house at four a.m., drove two blocks to an all-night gas station, and bought a large cup of coffee. On whether coffee was in fact haraam-forbidden to Muslims-Kaseke had yet to find a definitive answer; until that time, he would allow himself the indulgence. It was his only, after all. He neither smoked nor drank nor let his eyes linger too long on the relative nakedness of the women here.

  He got back into his car and drove to Open Heart Congregational Church. The streets of the city, rarely crowded anyway, were especially quiet. It had been raining since mid-afternoon, and now the only people moving about were those who had no choice in the matter: early-morning workers, delivery drivers, police… Of the latter he saw no cars, a sign, he believed, that Allah was with him.

  He circled the church once, then parked a couple of blocks north of the church in a video-store parking lot, then hefted his backpack over one shoulder and got out. Out of habit, he did not walk directly to the church but took a circuitous route. Finally satisfied he wasn’t being followed, Kaseke cut across the church’s front lawn to the hedges bordering the entrance steps, where he knelt down.

  From his pack he withdrew the first mine. Officially known as the M18A1 and colloquially as a “Claymore,” it was designed for use as an antipersonnel/area denial weapon. Shaped like a convex rectangle, the Claymore’s guts were uncomplicated: a layer of C4 plastic explosive supporting a layer of seven hundred steel ball bearings, each the size of #4 buckshot, embedded in a layer of resin. Upon detonation, the C4 sprays the seven hundred fragments outward at four thousand feet per second. As instructed and as trained, Kaseke had the previous night removed the Claymore’s outer casing and carefully sprinkled six ounces of rat-poison pellets amid the ball bearings. The poison’s active ingredient, Difethialone, an anticoagulant, would with luck keep even the smallest of wounds from clotting. It was a tactic his Palestinian brothers had used to great effect in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It hadn’t taken Israeli first responders long to catch on, but during that all-too-short grace period, many dozens had died, bleeding to death from what would have otherwise been minor lacerations. Having never seen such attacks before, paramedics here would face the same horror and confusion.

  Once satisfied the pellets were evenly distributed, Kaseke sealed the poison in place with a thin layer of candle wax, let it harden, then reassembled the Claymore’s outer shell. The manual had recommended tissue paper coated in a sheer layer of spray-on fabric adhesive, but the wax would work just as well, he knew. Next he checked each screw in turn, then the gapping, to ensure the shells were properly fitted. The manual had been explicit about that, too: If the outer casings were misaligned, the explosive force may be diverted. This instruction he followed to the letter.

  Now Kaseke extended the mine’s scissor legs. He then made sure the label-front toward enemy-was pointing toward the entrance of that church that would in a few hours be bustling with activity, then jammed the legs into the soft earth inside the hedges. He got down on his belly, crawled through the hedges, then turned around and peered through the open sight affixed to the top of the mine.

  Good. He’d chosen the perfect location. The blast would encompass not only the entrance and the steps but part of the sidewalk as well.

  He checked the mine’s clock against his own watch. They were synchronized. He set the countdown timer, pressed start, and watched a few seconds tick off before getting up and walking away.

  As was their custom on weekends, Hank Alvey woke up early on Sunday morning and quietly got their three kids out of bed, fed them oatmeal and blueberry waffles, then got them settled in front of the TV-the volume turned way down-for cartoons. The previous night’s rain clouds had moved on, leaving behind bright blue skies. Sunlight streamed through the living room windows and across the hardwood floors on which the kids now sat, entranced by the TV.

  Shortly before seven, he made Katie her sourdough toast and coffee, and woke her up with breakfast in bed. The tire shop he managed was closed on Sunday, so this was the only day he could relieve his wife of what would otherwise be a seven-day-a-week job. Taking care of the kids so she could sleep in an hour was, she frequently assured him, so romantic, and so sexy-and on most Sunday nights after the kids went to bed, she showed him exactly how much she appreciated the gesture.

  But that was for later, Hank reminded himself, pouring the coffee, which went on the tray next to the freshly buttered bread. Most mornings he was able to almost reach their bed before Katie rolled over and gave him a sleepy smile. This she did now.

  “What’s for breakfast?” she asked, smiling.

  “Take a guess.”

  “Ah, my favorite.” She sat up and shoved pillows behind her back. “What’d you do with the kids, lock them in the closet?”

  “They’re watching Yo Gabba Gabba! I think Jeremy’s got a crush on Foofa.”

  Katie took a bite of toast. “Which one’s that?”

  “The pink flower bubble thing.”

  “Right. Are we going to church?”

  “We’d better. We missed the last two Sundays. We can hit the nine o’clock, then take the kids to the park afterward.”

  “Okay, I’ll make myself pretty.”

  “Done,” Hank said, and headed for the door. “I’m going to let them out of the closet now.”

  Katie was down the stairs, dressed, her hair and makeup done, even before Hank was ready for shoes. Their oldest, Josh, could tie his own, but not so with Amanda and Jeremy, so Hank took one and Katie took the other, and then they were up and moving, looking for their coats and car keys, making sure the back door was locked…

  “We’re going to be late,” Katie called.

  Hank checked his watch. “Not quite a quarter till. We’ll be there in five minutes. Okay, kids, let’s get a move on…”

  Then they were out the door.

  Half a block north and west of the church, Kaseke was sitting on a bus bench, sipping his third cup of coffee of the day. From this angle he had a perfect vantage point of the front steps. There. The front doors opened, and people began emerging. Kaseke checked his watch: 8:48. Now from the path leading around the church to the rear parking lot came a line of nine a.m. worshippers. Leading the group was a young couple with three children, two boys and a girl, all three holding hands as they skipped ahead of their parents. Kaseke squeezed his eyes shut and asked Allah for strength. This was necessary. And the children, small as they were, would be killed instantly, so quickly that the pain wouldn’t have time to register in their minds.

  The incoming group reached the end of the path, where it joined the common area around the steps.

  Kaseke checked his watch. Less than a minute now.

  A hundred yards from where he’d planted the mine, he could not see that his plan was unraveling, and it would only be later, after he was captured, that the police would explain how he’d failed.

  For the past five hours, as the Claymore sat first in the rain and then in the early morning sun, the candle wax Kaseke had used to cement the rat-poison pellets to the ball bearings and their resin base began to crack. This alone wouldn’t have interfered with the mine’s function, but what Kaseke didn’t know was that this particular Claymore mine and eight others were more than two decades old and had spent the last eight years improperly s
tored either in a wooden box in a damp cave or buried in the sun-baked soil of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province.

  As the candle wax cracked inside the casing, the resin, far past its effective lifespan and as brittle as a fortune cookie, also cracked, but only a few millimeters. It was enough, however, to loosen the sockets in which fourteen of the ball bearings rested. With overlapping metallic tinks that no one on the church steps would hear over the babble of voices, the fourteen ball bearings broke free and dropped against the shell’s lower casing. If not for ten hours of rain that had fallen since the previous afternoon, this, too, wouldn’t have hindered the mine’s detonation, but the legs holding it upright in the soil, now softened to a mudlike consistency, succumbed to the weight of the fallen ball bearings. At 8:49:36, twenty-four seconds before detonation, Kaseke’s carefully aimed Claymore tipped forward and came to a rest at a forty-five-degree angle, half its face pointing at the dirt, the other half pointing at the concrete.

  When she would awake later that day in the hospital, Katie Alvey’s first thoughts would be, My husband’s dead and I think my children are alive, followed by the realization that dumb luck probably played a big part in both those outcomes.

  As Kaseke’s mine was tipping forward, the Alvey family mounted the front steps along with dozens of other late arrivals and started upward. Hank walked closest to the hedges bordering the steps, with Josh and Amanda to his left, then Katie and Jeremy, who was holding his mom’s hand.

  Witnesses would later describe the explosion as a whoosh followed by the hailstorm from hell. Katie neither saw nor heard these things but had for some reason turned her head to look at Hank when the Claymore went off. Of the seven hundred bearings inside the mine, four hundred or so struck the dirt, cratering the bed and taking a yard-wide chunk out of the concrete. The remainder of the bearings either skittered along the concrete, punching through feet and calves, shattering bones and ripping away whole chunks of flesh, or bounced off the concrete and tore across the steps at various angles and trajectories. Those unlucky enough to be struck by these were either killed instantly or suffered horrific limb injuries. Hank Alvey, his body protecting his oldest boy and his daughter, caught a ball bearing beneath the left jaw, effectively cleaving his head into three portions. Katie saw this but had no time to react, no time to grab any of the children or to shield Jeremy with her body. As it turned out, none of it had been necessary.

  Katie stood blinking, her ears ringing and her brain failing to immediately register the carnage around her. On either side of her, Josh, Jeremy, and Amanda were similarly stunned, but that passed quickly, and then the tears started to flow. The steps were awash in blood and littered with arms and legs and unidentifiable chunks of… who? She recognized no one. Dozens of people lay strewn across the concrete. Some weren’t moving, while others writhed in pain or tried to crawl away or toward loved ones, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.

  Then Katie’s ears cleared and she heard the screaming. And sirens.

  86

  AFTER MAKING SURE all the drapes were closed, they turned on lights around the house, then Jack called Pasternak and had him pull the van into the garage. The doctor walked through the kitchen door and stopped short. “Is that him?”

  Jack said, “No, this is Tariq, the Emir’s bodyguard.”

  In fact, it had taken ten minutes of talking to simply get Tariq to admit his own name. Beyond that, he’d said nothing. Chavez and Domingo were tossing the rest of the house, but so far it had all the individuality of a builder’s model home. There were no personal touches.

  “It appears we just missed the man himself,” Jack said. “Go have a seat in the living room, Doc. We’ll call you.” He joined Clark at the table across from Tariq. They’d bound his hands and ankles with duct tape, then taped his feet to the kitchen-table leg.

  “What happened to your hands?” Clark asked.

  Tariq took them off the table and put them in his lap. “A fire.”

  “I assumed that. How specifically?”

  “You invade my home, drag me from my bed. You are not the police. Who are you; what do you want?”

  “You know why we’re here,” Jack said. “When did he leave?”

  “Who? I live here alone.”

  “Shasif Hadi tells us a different story,” Clark said.

  At the mention of Hadi’s name, Tariq’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, then went back to normal.

  “Aren’t you interested in how we found Hadi?” Jack asked. “We picked him up in Rio de Janeiro. After the attack on the Paulinia refinery, he was ordered by the Emir to break contact with Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed. The Emir had told him the others had betrayed him.”

  “That’s not-” Tariq stopped in mid-sentence.

  Clark said, “Not true? You’re right. The truth is we broke your crypto. All those onetime pads embedded in the website banners… We broke it, then uploaded a message to Hadi’s storage site of the day, and sent him on the run-right into our laps.” Clark looked at Jack. “It took, what, ten minutes for him to break?”

  “Not even. Here’s another piece of news, Tariq: The cargo ship Losan-we put a stop to that, too. The Salim kids are dead, and the Newport News Fire Department is offloading the propane tanks as we speak.”

  This time, Tariq couldn’t help himself. “You’re lying!”

  “About what part?” Clark asked. “Hadi or Losan?”

  “Both.”

  “So you admit who you are and that you know the Emir.”

  Tariq clasped his hands on the table before him and stared straight ahead.

  From the hallway, Ding called, “John, you’re gonna want to see this.”

  Clark and Jack found Ding and Dominic in the master bedroom. Sitting atop a chest of drawers was a laptop. Ding said, “We found it in the nightstand.” He hit the return key.

  After a few moments, the Emir’s face appeared on the screen. The backdrop was the living room couch and wall. “My name is Saif Rahman Yasin. I am also known as the Emir, and I am the commander of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. I speak to you today as a devout Muslim and a humble servant and soldier of Allah. By now the world has already witnessed the vengeance of Allah visited upon the infidel nation of America…”

  Clark tapped the return button, stopping the video. “That’s the sonofabitch’s last testament.”

  Jack asked, “What’s the date on this?”

  “Yesterday,” Dominic answered.

  “Christ.”

  They followed Clark down the hall and back to the dining nook. Clark sat down at the table while everyone else hung back.

  “Tariq.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to tell me where Saif is and what he’s doing. Before you answer, you need to understand the ground rule: You get one chance to answer, and then-”

  Tariq stared ahead. “You’re going to kill me? Go ahead; I do not fear death. I’ll be welcomed into paradise as a-”

  “We’re not going to kill you, Tariq, but before another hour passes, you’re going to wish you were.”

  Tariq turned and looked at Clark. “I’m not afraid.”

  Clark regarded him solemnly for a few moments, and then, without taking his eyes off Tariq, said over his shoulder to Ding, “Go fill up the bathtub.”

  Clark had never quite understood the debate over whether or not waterboarding was torture. Anyone who’d either been through it or seen it firsthand knew that it was torture. It got results, the validity of which could be ascertained only by a particularly astute interrogator or subsequent intelligence gathering. Clark was blessed with the former attribute but lacked the time and resources for the latter.

  Eight minutes, a saturated towel, and exactly thirty-two ounces of water was all it took. Satisfied, Clark rose from his crouched position over the barely conscious and sputtering Tariq and turned to Ding, who stood, arms folded, as he leaned against the bathroom wall.

  “Pull the plug,” Clark ordered. “Get him
cleaned up and locked down.”

  “You buy it, John?”

  “Yeah.” Clark checked his watch. “Either way, we’re outta time.”

  87

  CLARK STRODE back into the kitchen. “Jack, grab the phone book. We need the closest airfield. Commercial helicopter tours will be our best bet.”

  “On it.”

  “Dom, you’ll drive. Doctor, are you comfortable staying here with him?” Ding was coming down the hall, dragging Tariq behind him. “We’ll be back for you.”

  “Sure.”

  Jack called, “Paragon Air Helicopter Tours on Highway Two-fifteen. Three miles from here.”

  They were out the door in thirty seconds and on the highway in two minutes. Clark used the sat phone to dial The Campus. Rick Bell answered, and Clark said, “I need you, Gerry, and Sam on conference call right now.”

  “Hold on.”

  Thirty seconds passed. Hendley came on the line. “What’ve you got, John?”

  “I’ve got Jack on the line, too. Our guy is gone, left yesterday. A bodyguard was still at the house. They’ve got a bomb, Gerry, probably something below ten kilotons but big enough for what they’ve got planned.”

  “Wait, back up? Is this credible?”

  “I believe it is. We have to assume it is.”

  “Where’d they get it?”

  “No idea. Our guy didn’t have that info.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “The Emir’s meeting with six other men about a hundred miles north of here. The bodyguard didn’t have the nuts-and-bolts details, but their target is Yucca Mountain.”

  “As in the nuclear waste repository?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s not even open yet. There’s nothing there.”

  “There’s groundwater,” Jack replied.

  “Come again?”