Intercept

by Patrick Robinson

  Now Ibrahim took the lead, walking due north, guided by his small pocket compass, toward a point on Route 9, just west of the New Mexico town of Columbus, on the southern slopes of the misleadingly named Florida Mountains.

  7

  THERE WAS SILENCE now in the rough, wooded ground where the four Islamic killers walked. The two patrol guards lay dead in the dust some two hundred yards behind them, and, as if unnerved by the sudden and dangerous events of the past fifteen minutes, Ibrahim began to run.

  Circumstances were closing in on him. He and his cohorts were ultimately still free, but they were plainly wanted men: they were four illegal immigrants, wearing Mexican ponchos, Stetson hats, cowboy boots, and each carrying a loaded Kalashnikov. Not to mention the hand-grenade, and the two cold-blooded murders.

  Ibrahim understood that if the getaway vehicles were right where they were supposed to be, it might be okay. But if anyone else saw the four men, they had about an hour before they were on their way back to Cuba. They had documents and passports with false names. But the American authorities had excellent prison photographs of them all, and they’d probably fly that bastard Sergeant Biff Ransom in from Guantanamo to identify them.

  In Ibrahim’s opinion, dressed and armed as they were, they were doomed in the United States. They did not have the knowledge or the experience to evade the law indefinitely. He himself had attended Harvard, but that was years ago.

  Ibrahim hoped they’d have their moment of revenge sometime in the not too-distant-future, but right now the cards were stacked against them. Because sometime in the next couple of hours, they would all be wanted, nationwide, for murder.

  They could not just hide their rifles because their fingerprints were all over them. They would just have to keep jogging forward wearing their ponchos to hide the weapons. Ibrahim considered that prayer was the only answer, and as he jogged through the scrubland, he begged Allah to grant them safe passage toward the Islamic brothers who waited for them somewhere a mile up ahead. He also decided he would re-grow his beard, in the Islamic tradition, after the years of enforced clean-shaving in a U.S. prison camp.

  They ran on for another ten minutes. There were lights, car headlights, traveling fast along Route 9. Ibrahim was searching for a grain elevator, his landmark. Somewhere to the left of that was his rendezvous spot, where there should be three cars so they could split up as the police would be looking for a group of four, not one single person or two.

  Ibrahim was slightly out of breath now, but he still managed to tell Yousaf, Ben, and Abu they must get rid of their ponchos, hats, boots, and guns as soon as they reached the rendezvous point—to throw them into the trunks of the cars and instruct the drivers to lose them. Abu Hassan did not want to give up his Kalashnikov, but understood the foolishness of trying to keep it.

  They reached the road, found the cars, and shook hands with their drivers. Then they piled their gear into the trunks, separated, and set off for the railroad station at Albuquerque, 267 miles to the north, straight along New Mexico Interstate 25.

  Ibrahim and Yousaf traveled individually, both in fast Ford sedans; Ben and Abu in the back of a Buick. All three drivers wore jeans and cowboy shirts and boots, standard American gear for this part of the world.

  Ibrahim understood there were many things that now mattered, which had not mattered before—their appearance, their avoidance of being seen together, the destruction of their old clothes and rifles, their constant unobtrusiveness. Everything was now heightened, and everything now mattered. Their eating habits, their dress, their newspapers. They needed to be seen as Americans.

  Ibrahim, however, was keenly aware of what really mattered. And that was the undeniable fact that they had breached the U.S. border. They were back in the United States and they were ready to attack. Shakir Khan’s al-Qaeda network was already helping them. The Sleeper Cells were active.

  They were on their way to the East Coast to prepare for the next great Islamic assault on the Great Satan, in the name of Allah, and under the banner of the Prophet. That was what really mattered. Ibrahim slept the calm and tranquil sleep of the righteous, as his young driver, Abby Gamal, formerly of Lahore, gunned the Ford north.

  THE BODIES of the two patrolmen, Officer Ray Carrol and Officer Matt D’Arcy, were discovered by the incoming shift around one hour after the murders, just after eleven. The headlights of the jeep were still on and the engine was still running.

  There were shootings and deaths quite often along this side of the border, but the killing of security guards was rare. Mexican peasants seeking only a safe crossing were not often armed, and most of the gun-fighting was conducted against drug-runners and other villains, who attempted to storm this back door into the United States.

  Within an hour of the discovery of the bodies there were six New Mexico police cruisers at the scene, blue lights flashing in the night, a dozen state troopers, several forensic guys, and various homicide detectives from both the cities of Deming and Las Cruces.

  If the bodies had been those of Mexicans, the authorities would have moved heaven and earth to keep things quiet at least for a few days, while the diplomats tried to calm down the Mexican government. But this was different. In the opinion of the police it was Mexicans who were the perpetrators, the Americans the victims, brutally slain while conducting their lawful duties on behalf of the State. This was an outrage.

  Back at the Deming Police Department, twenty-three miles north of the crime scene, the public relations officer had already been called in at midnight to issue an immediate press release to every newspaper and television and radio station in the country:With immense regret the Police Department of Deming, New Mexico, announces that two state border patrolmen, Officers Ray Carrol and Matt D’Arcy, both of Columbus, New Mexico, were shot down and killed on the United States side of the border fence with Mexico at approximately 10 p.m. last evening.

  The incident occurred at a point on the wire two miles southeast of the city of Columbus. Both men were shot from behind. It was an hour before the bodies were found.

  So far there have been no arrests, but the police are treating the deaths as murder in the first degree. The FBI have been informed, and unusually, the CIA have announced they are sending investigators to the crime scene, direct from Langley, Virginia.

  The shootings had happened too late to make it into the morning papers on the East Coast, where they were two hours ahead of New Mexico. But the release was perfectly timed for the twenty-four-hour rolling news channels. The New York Daily News revamped its front page in the small hours, hitting the street the following morning with:U.S. PATROL SLAIN

  ON MEXICAN BORDER

  The Chicago Sun-Times, with an hour more to prepare, was just as brash:MURDER ON MEXICO BORDER

  MANHUNT FOR KILLERS

  OF U.S. PATROL

  All through the night CNN, Fox News, and the rest were running and building the story, conducting interviews with half-asleep people, trying to get ahold of the families of the dead men, who were currently under the rigid protection of the Deming police department.

  From a media point of view, the trouble with this type of story was that in the middle of the night, no one wants you either on the phone or standing outside the front door. But the reporters kept going, probing, trying to find out the number of bullets fired, from what kind of gun, who had been first on the scene, and if there were any suspects, motives, or angles.

  There was a groundswell behind this story, merely because so many people wanted answers and there were none. There was no sign of a gun battle. The guards’ pistols had not been fired. There was no sign of a struggle, and thus no one knew why the Americans had died. There were zero witnesses and no suspects.

  By lunchtime the CIA agents had arrived by helicopter, and were given unhindered access to both the police and local detectives. Subsequently they filed the best report, but only back to their own Langley headquarters.

  Bob Birmingham read it thoroughly and passed it o
n to Captain Ramshawe. Both were intrigued that the guards had been shot from behind. They had fallen forward, both of them holding aimed, loaded revolvers. This suggested there were at least two, and possible three men standing in front of them, probably being told to raise their hands high. The man who had killed them was a third or fourth person, and they plainly had not known he was there.

  That person had shot each of them in the back of the head, twice, using a Kalashnikov rifle, which is the weapon of choice for professional criminals, especially foreigners, because it’s relatively easy to purchase on the black market via Russia. It is also much less likely to be traced back to a specific gun shop by its U.S. serial numbers.

  In Captain Ramshawe’s initial opinion, that gave the authorities probably four armed criminals, trying to cross the Mexican border into the United States. They had somehow been sighted by the guards, and apprehended; except for one of their number, who had hidden himself in the dark, and then crept around the parked jeep, with its engine running noisily, and shot the two guards who were about to arrest his mates. Ultimately, however, he decided that four made more sense than three because his own investigations into the disappearance of The Chosen Ones had led him to Mexico City about an hour before.

  Ramshawe had ordered a massive computerized search for every Muslim organization in the world that had recognizable acronyms. There were of course thousands. But then the researchers asked for addresses, and fed, into the program, the Avenue Colonia del Valle, and out popped MCM (Muslim Center de Mexico), located on Avenue Colonia, a middle-class area of Mexico City.

  Not only that but it had a massive website, accessed from all corners of the world by people planning to visit Mexico. The intercepted message from Peshawar suggested the four ex-Guantanamo Bay inmates were right there, in one of Mexico’s newest mosques.

  Jimmy was back on the line to Bob Birmingham in moments, and two CIA station field officers were dispatched to the doorstep of MCM to make inquiries. They learned that the four had made no friends in MCM, mostly because of their aloof and unsociable attitudes. No one liked them, especially the one with the scar.

  One friendly imam was only too pleased to confirm they had been there, but had now left. He identified the photographs, confirmed the four men had been in residence for only twenty-four hours, and then left for the airport. He had no idea where they were going. This motley group of facts was presented to the director of the National Security Agency, and Jimmy instantly connected the missing Muslims with the border killings.

  “Gotta be the same blokes, right?” muttered Jimmy to himself. “They’ve been helped by a national organization on every bloody step of their journey. Travel plans immaculate. Money no object. And we’ve been about five steps behind, all the bloody way.”

  Jimmy Ramshawe was certain the cold-blooded shooting of the two guards must have been the work of Ibrahim Sharif and his team. It was the exact right day and the exact right time for these four professional terrorists to breach the border. “And now where the hell are they? Right back in the USA, of course. Everything that made us nervous on the day they were released, just came true.”

  Jimmy knew the guys who had checked into the old MCM in Avenue Colonia, and the gang who had just blasted their way into the United States were one in the same. We have to find these characters because they are planning something terrible.

  He picked up his secure phone and dialed Mack Bedford in Maine. The ex-SEAL commander was surprisingly sanguine about the situation, saying simply, “Ever since last February, when that Judge Stamford Osborne kicked ’em out of the front door, I always thought they’d come right back in, through the back.”

  THE SOUTHWESTERN CHIEF came thundering into Albuquerque’s First Street station four minutes late from Los Angeles. The massive diesel locomotive, now bound for Chicago, was a deafening presence in the quiet, sunlit, adobe New Mexican city.

  Abrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan stood separately on the departure platform, some fifty yards apart. They had purchased new clothes and now stood dressed for a city. No neckties, but white shirts with sport coats and regular black loafers. No Stetsons or ponchos. Definitely no Kalashnikovs. Each now carried a briefcase: brown leather for Ibrahim and Yousaf, black for the others.

  Their tickets had been pre-paid under the names on their passports. They each had a reserved seat, and they boarded the great American passenger train without even a flicker of recognition, seated far apart but with reservations in the dining car that placed them within conversational distance.

  Yousaf thought the whole thing was, in a Western phrase, pretty nifty. Which was understandable since his normal family train rides had often involved carriages packed to the gunwales with rural farmers, and sometimes their livestock, with others riding on the roof carrying baskets of live chickens.

  And the four gazed through the windows in awe as the mighty locomotive pulled out at 12:40 p.m. sharp, speeding through the manicured suburbs of Albuquerque, on its 550-mile journey along the old cattle routes, to Dodge City: ETA a half-hour after midnight.

  The route took them through vast expanses of the fabled American West, from New Mexico through wheat fields, past ranches and missions, across mountains and deserts, and sometimes thundering through curving canyon passages only a few feet wider than the train itself.

  They dined on roast beef and ice cream, and rolled into Dodge City at 12:34 a.m. They were booked into separate sleeping cars, and slept as the Chief hammered its way across the great flat blue-stem prairies of Kansas.

  They were all awakened as the train echoed its way into the gigantic Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, for its scheduled twenty minute service stop. Ben and Abu went back to sleep, but Ibrahim and Yousaf headed out onto the breathtaking concourse and gaped at the almost hundred-foot high ceiling, with its three massive 3,500-pound chandeliers, and six-foot wide clock hanging over the central archway.

  Neither of them had ever seen anything like it, anywhere, never mind in a train station. And they forgot about not knowing each other as they stood there gazing around them, staring at the ornamental plasterwork completed in the 1999 renovation. It would, of course, have meant nothing to them, but the spectacular mouldings in the ceiling were crafted by Hayles and Howe, fresh from restoring the ceilings of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire.

  Ibrahim and Yousaf walked back to the train and headed to the dining car for breakfast, speaking softly at adjoining tables as the locomotive pulled out of the Taj Mahal of railroad stations at a quarter to eight in the morning.

  They were still sipping coffee as the train hauled over the 135-foot high steel bridge that spans the Missouri, America’s longest river. From there it set off on a three-and-a-half hour journey across the plains of northern Missouri, and then made a twenty-mile dash through southern Iowa. But just after the scheduled stop at Fort Madison, right on the Illinois line, the train came to a shuddering halt, for no apparent reason, in the middle of nowhere.

  Ibrahim, raised on a lifetime of old, mostly pirated British and American movies, half-expected a squadron of Hitler’s Nazis to come jackbooting along the corridor demanding papers. American Nazis, of course, but nonetheless officers who would seize him and his pals and bring them back to the concentration camp of Guantanamo Bay.

  He turned to a young man sitting right next to him reading the Kansas City Star and asked, “Why this hold up? Is this official?”

  “Official! Hell no,” the kid replied. “We just reached the Mississippi. We got river traffic coming under the bridge. It happens sometimes. Probably make us twenty minutes late getting to Chicago.”

  Ibrahim Sharif had not felt such relief since Judge Osborne had freed him. He had no idea why a ship could shut the bridge, since he thought ships went under bridges and trains ran over them. He’d certainly never seen a bridge where the center span pivots to make a gap. And he sat patiently until the Chief moved forward again, and rumbled over the world’s longest double-decked swing-span bridge, high
above America’s second longest river.

  They reached Princeton, Illinois, at one o’clock and Chicago at twenty minutes after 3 p.m. Right on time at the end of the line, with 1,340 miles behind them. They had been on that train for almost twenty-seven hours, and no one in the United States had the slightest idea of their whereabouts.

  The CIA suspected they were hiding out somewhere in the endless scrubland desert of New Mexico. Captain Ramshawe thought it more likely they had cleared the datum, and possibly taken a plane to God knows where.

  But the FBI had alerted every airport security office and issued photographs of the four men, top-class photographs taken both in Guantanamo and in the Washington Court. They had e-mailed the images nationwide. Every airport guard was on the lookout for the four murder suspects. In Albuquerque’s International Sunport, a force of twenty reinforcements had been drafted in.

  Every highway patrol in the country had the four photos on their cruiser screen. State troopers scanned every vehicle as they drove past. In New Mexico and the adjoining states of Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and the Oklahoma panhandle, any vehicle, car or truck, was pulled over if it carried more than four people. There were unprecedented traffic jams on the freeways of the southwestern states.

  The murder of the two border guards was being treated like an assault on the very manhood of the United States. Who the hell were these little creeps, come busting in here, and opening fire on Uncle Sam’s finest? Left to the public and the media there could be a good old-fashioned Wild West lynch-party before sundown.

  Except no one knew where the murderers actually were. And the gigantic manhunt taking place was having no luck whatsoever. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu were having coffee at separate tables in the Chicago station, trying not to look at each other, waiting to board Amtrak’s famous Cardinal for the 1,145-mile journey to New York City, partway along the historic old lines of the picturesque Norfolk and Southern Railroad.