Intercept

by Patrick Robinson

  And so, while the entire southwestern sprawl of the United States was consumed with their capture, the four former Guantanamo prisoners were casually reading the afternoon newspapers, which by now were splashing with the photographs, big, on the front page, of the men who were wanted for the double murder.

  It’s a strange phenomena in the United States that the railroads, which opened up the lands to the west, and played such a massive part in forging the nation, are not considered as mainstream long-distance transport. Everyone flies. So if a police force seeks out fugitives from justice, they go for airports and roads. Which left Ibrahim and his guys more or less in peace until the Cardinal reached New York City.

  And once more, the four terrorists stayed separate, uttering no word about their current notoriety, but each of them wishing there had been another way across that Mexican border, a method that might have prevented Abu Hassan blowing Ray and Matt’s brains out.

  They boarded the Cardinal at 5 p.m. ready for the 5:45 departure. Ibraham had looked up the timetable and discovered the huge locomotive would haul the train for more than twenty-eight hours, with thirty-one stops, before it pulled into New York’s Penn Station, tomorrow night.

  Ibrahim had no idea who the al-Qaeda mastermind was who was arranging their travel. But when he had reported to the ticket office in Chicago, everything was ready. Under the same false names, which required passport or driver’s license photo identity, there were travel tickets, vouchers for the dining car, and reserved sleeping berths. There would be no need for any of the four to speak one word throughout the long journey.

  The Cardinal pulled out on time and headed south southeast through the flat wheat fields, past the soybeans and fruit, hay, hogs, and oats, two hundred miles, running in the dark, all the way to the Ohio border. They reached Cincinnati in the small hours as the men from the Middle East slept soundly in the sleeper car.

  In the relatively short run along the northern edge of Kentucky, dawn began to break, and still the presses were pounding out newspapers, demanding the police find the men who had murdered the border guards, almost two thousand miles behind the train.

  The sun rose over the banks of the mighty Ohio River as the Cardinal prepared for its final swing to the south from the West Virginian city of Huntington. From there it rolled on toward the southern end of the Allegheny Mountains. It stopped at White Sulphur Springs at 11:30 a.m. And when it left, it headed directly toward the high slopes of the Virginia Appalachians.

  For Ibrahim and Yousaf, it was hard to believe this was all the same country. And now they were in some kind of wonderland, crossing the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, where another revolutionary, General Stonewall Jackson, had once nearly driven the government armies crazy.

  If Ibrahim and Yousaf had understood the slightest vestige of U.S. history they would probably have sensed an affinity with that great southern warrior, and the Valley where his ghost haunts to this day. But they knew nothing. And when they reached Charlottesville, home of President Thomas Jefferson, they also knew nothing. Even when the conductor announced the significance of the stop, they stared blankly and separately, unaware of the revolution the third president had so influenced more than 230 years before—an even greater rebellion than their own.

  They were, in a sense, kindred spirits passing in the mountain mists. Because they were men for whom a flame of righteousness could not be extinguished. The difference was, the Americans were highly educated, sure of their truths, sure of their intellectual ground.

  Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan were little more than rabid dogs of war, fanatics who would kill and maim, without one thought about the ultimate outcome, the futility of their efforts, or the shocking consequences of staging a four-man war on the United States.

  Right now, they rode in peace, heading to Washington and then New York. It grew dark again as they left the nation’s capital, and it was almost 9:30 as they pulled into Penn Station.

  Ibrahim had slyly informed them to meet him outside the main entrance where the taxi queue was located. He had an address, to which they should report. He also had a phone number, and all four still had their cell phones given to them in Mexico but connected to an American network.

  Everyone was calm and confident, except for Abu Hassan, who was the most distinctive of them. All the way from Alexandria, he had been conscious of a fellow passenger staring at him. Every time he looked up, the man, a middle-aged, balding guy in a city suit and necktie, was looking directly at him. Abu also noticed the man was reading the Washington Post, which had photographs of all four of them splashed on its front page. The Palestinian had been on the run for most of his life, either from the Mossad, the Israeli army, or the U.S. armed forces. And right now he smelled danger, not because of who the man might be, but because it didn’t matter who he was. Anyone in this country could betray him with one phone call. It would not take much more than that for all of them to find themselves under tight arrest.

  Abu could not talk about it, nor could he indicate he suspected he was being watched. Instead he kept his head down and watched for the moment when the guy moved or left the carriage. If he made a phone call, Abu believed he would have to act.

  Abu decided to play it quietly, and all the way into New York, the man never moved, just read his newspaper, and periodically spent time staring at Abu, who was pretending to doze quietly.

  The train came out of the tunnel and slowed as it entered Penn Station. Abu made certain he was behind his quarry as they walked down the platform, separated by about twenty feet. From this slender indication of amateurism, Abu Hassan understood the man was not a real detective or an undercover policemen. He was just a concerned, observant individual.

  They traveled up the escalator, and Abu could see the man was heading directly to the men’s room, which was off to the right, from the main drift of the passengers heading for the street exit.

  Aside from the arrival of the Cardinal, the station was quiet. New York was going in other directions. The commuters had gone home for the night, the young crowd was out in the bars, and the swells were concluding dinner.

  Abu’s man entered the men’s room, which was virtually deserted. And at that point he took a cell phone out of his pocket and opened the door to one of the cubicles. Abu watched him from the corner, watched the door slam shut, and heard the lock click into place.

  In the accepted sense of the term, Abu was unarmed. What no one knew, even his colleagues, was that he still had the hand grenade, which he’d slipped into his briefcase and carried three quarters of the way across the United States at truly stupendous risk.

  Abu reached into his briefcase and pulled out the heavy, round shell. He ripped out the pin and rolled it under the outer wall of the first cubicle. It rolled noisily, through four more cubicles, but no one was listening, except perhaps the man now calling the police from his cell phone.

  Abu spun around and walked steadily back into the crowd heading for the exit. Now he could see Ibrahim, Yousaf, and Ben, and he tried to avoid converging with them. But suddenly there was an earth-shattering explosion, as fifteen toilet-bowls and twelve sinks were blasted clean through the ceiling of the men’s room.

  The entire edifice shook. Above, Madison Square Garden shuddered at probably the biggest single bang heard in that 125-year-old arena since Smokin’ Joe Frazier’s fifteenth round left hook temporarily flattened Mohammed Ali on March 8, 1971.

  Below in the men’s room it looked like a scene from Hiroshima. There was nothing left, and there was a twenty-foot gaping hole in the obliterated ceiling. High pressure jets of water were scything in every direction, rapidly causing a flood. It was probably the longest and most powerful toilet-flush in recorded history.

  There was no possibility of survival, not in that tightly enclosed space, surrounded by heavy marble in the walls and floor. In fact that heavy-duty structural material had contained the blast, driving it upward, causing serious damage directly ab
ove in the arena.

  Meanwhile, Abu and Ben piled into a yellow cab, while Yousaf and Ibrahim jumped into another and took the lead. Ibrahim asked the driver if he knew where number 300 East Seventy-Sixth Street was, and with the second cab following, line astern, they made their way through light city traffic to the Upper East Side. They disembarked, and Ibrahim, who had the money and the address, paid for both cabs.

  “Hey, nice apartments,” said Ben looking up.

  “Guess so,” replied Ibrahim. “Pity we’re not going in.”

  “What d’you mean?” asked Ben.

  “You don’t think I’d have two New York cab drivers running around knowing the precise address where they dropped off four Arabs, do you, right after Abu nearly knocked down Penn Station? Sorry. We have to walk south to Sixty-Ninth Street. That’s where we’re staying.”

  Abu looked momentarily chagrined, and he said, “Ibrahim, I’m telling you, that guy knew who I was. He was reading the paper, and my picture was all over the front page. He kept on looking at me.”

  “I just wonder if you might not have taken him out with maybe less of a national catastrophe?”

  “We are all unarmed, so I couldn’t shoot him,” replied Abu. “I couldn’t risk a fight because I might have lost, and I couldn’t risk the chance he might have been a cop or a detective, carrying a gun. I had just one chance to kill him, and I knew I could get out of that railroad station without being noticed. Those grenades got a twenty-second lead-time after the pin gets pulled. I cover a lot of ground in twenty seconds.”

  “You were not supposed to have the grenade. It could have put us all in danger.”

  “If I hadn’t had it, we might all be in jail by now, and jail is worse than danger.”

  “Abu Hassan,” said Ibrahim, “it was very brilliant of you to spot that guy. And correct to take him out before he could use his phone. But now we must lay very low, because every person in the United States is going to be looking for us, not just half of the country like they were earlier today.”

  “With our luck,” said Ben, “the guy Abu removed will probably turn out to be the Mayor of New York or someone like that.”

  “Mayors don’t shit in Penn Station,” retorted Abu.

  “How you know that?” demanded Yousaf, who was quite shaken by recent events.

  “I never heard of even one mayor in all the world who ever took a shit in Penn Station. I never even heard of a mayor who farted in Penn Station. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “Shut up,” snapped Ibrahim. “And separate. Walk farther apart, and cross the street at the next light.”

  They covered the next two blocks in silence, drifting farther away, one from the other, on the way downtown to Sixty-Ninth Street. When they reached it, Ibrahim gathered everyone together in the shadows, and told them, “This is a very important man we are seeing. He will tell us not to go out together at any time. Everyone should do as he says, okay?”

  No one argued, and Ibrahim ordered two of them to go back across the street, and then enter the building one at a time at ten-minute intervals—“Me first, then Yousaf, then Abu, then Ben,” he said. “You will each buzz Apartment 21D, three quick, two slow. That way we know it’s you. The man’s name is on the directory on the wall, next to the buzzer. He’s Faisal al-Assad, a Saudi.”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “It is so far as we’re concerned. He works for his government. Finance, oil, and construction. He’s a close friend of Shakir Khan.”

  NEWS OF THE PENN STATION “bomb” broke on the 11 o’clock television news bulletins. The police had instantly cordoned off Seventh and Eighth Avenues for five blocks, north and south, and closed the cross streets from West Twenty-Ninth to West Thirty-Third, all the way from Ninth Avenue to Sixth. They evacuated several buildings because of a general fear that this was 9/11 all over again and that there would be more bombs.

  The media leapt immediately to the conclusion that the Penn Station bomb was the work of a terrorist cell operating in Manhattan. The slug line on Fox News quickly became: Terrorists Hit New York All Over Again.

  All through the night the media attempted to make sense of the bombing. They were waiting for someone to step forward and lay claim to the disaster, as terrorists usually did.

  By the time New York’s Daily News came out at dawn, the media were treating it as a full-blooded mystery: “Was it Al-Qaeda that bombed Penn Station?” “Was the Evil Hand of Bin Laden Behind This?” “Police Baffled by Bombers’ Silence.”

  Because there was as yet no death toll, the New York Post, predictably thought it was marginally amusing, their front page reading “Who Bombed the John?”

  The police confirmed that twenty-seven people had been injured, most of them Amtrak and Penn Station staff. The only serious injury was caused when a member of the cleaning staff was flattened by a hunk of flying masonry.

  No one knew whether anyone had been in the men’s room when the bomb detonated. Right now the place was just a heap of rubble, with three feet of water being pumped out by the fire department, while emergency crews tried to halt the flow from dozens of fractured waterpipes.

  As the morning wore on, the reality of the story set in. There was no proof of terrorist involvement, but New York had ground to a halt in the central midtown area during the night. The morning rush-hour traffic was affected, but a vast squadron of police, security guards, and tracker dogs had found nothing after a twelve-hour search. The city was expected to return to normal before the afternoon rush-hour was under way. They even had Penn Station functioning again that morning, mostly because the blast had gone upward, and Madison Square Garden was dark that night.

  Nonetheless, there remained the suspicion of terrorism, based on the simple truth that in this modern world, aside from half-crazed jihadists, not many people walk around midtown Manhattan with bombs in their briefcases.

  The FBI and the CIA were called in and both reached the same verdict: The key lies in knowing the precise identities of anyone who died in the men’s room through DNA, if human remains were found.

  In addition, there was the possibility of people calling in to report that their relatives or loved ones had been in Penn Station at the time and had not been heard from. The bomb-thrower had plainly vanished, and there was little that could be done until forensics turned up evidence and the missing were identified.

  Seventeen hours after the blast, Mrs.Susan Harvey, of West Thirty-Six Street reported the disappearance of her husband, Michael, a coal-mining executive who had been traveling back to New York on the Cardinal. As far as she knew, he had boarded the train at Charleston, West Virginia, at around 8:15 in the morning, and arrived in New York just before 10 p.m. She told them that Michael preferred the train to flying because it gave him time to work, rest, and think, and deposited him just a few blocks from home.

  Mrs. Harvey had not heard from him since he left Charleston, and had been assuming he either missed the train or changed his plans. Now she was beside herself with worry.

  The second person to call in was a Miss Irena Seaford, of East Eighty-Second Street. Her father was missing. He had taken the late Amtrak from Penn Station to Philadelphia to visit her sister—or at least that’s what she thought. But he never arrived, and the entire family was now concerned that he had somehow been injured in the station bombing.

  The police could only say they had no reports of anyone dying in the blast, and that the names of Michael Harvey and Thomas Seaford were not on the injured list. It would be two more days before gruesome body parts were recovered and examined, and the police laboratories confirmed both missing men had indeed died instantly in the men’s room explosion.

  In a sense, this made the investigation even more difficult, because there was not a single shred of evidence to suggest that either Michael or Thomas could possibly have been a target for an al-Qaeda jihadist.

  Interest in the Penn Station bomb began to wane. Even Captain Ramshawe, whose paranoia for terrorist activities was
all-consuming, began to veer toward the “nutcase” theory as there was no rhyme or reason to the explosion—two non-entity New Yorkers killed, neither with any connection to politics or terrorism.

  THE CHOSEN WERE NOW comfortably installed in the six-bedroomed duplex apartment of Mr. Faisal al-Assad, the tall, dark-skinned Saudi who acted as Shakir Khan’s right arm for all of al-Qaeda’s operations in the United States. These operations had been somewhat limited during the past few years, while an angry George W. Bush prowled around the White House threatening to eliminate half the Himalayas if anyone from Afghanistan or Pakistan dared even to let off a firecracker in the United States during his watch.

  And predictably no one did, which put the Saudi financier on hold for a few years. But Faisal al-Assad was a fanatic along with the rest of them. And the flame of injustice burned within him. He had earned the admiration of his colleagues in the mountains above the Swat Valley by his superlative, and secretive, handling of the Islamic treasure chest in the West, especially during the preparations for 9/11. He somehow managed to remain the acceptable face of Middle Eastern capitalism, while working in tandem with the totally unacceptable Osama bin Laden

  But now things had changed. There were key al-Qaeda men being freed from Guantanamo, and al-Assad was ready to go back to work. And it was with genuine warmth and friendship that he welcomed Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu into his home, laughing and clapping when he heard that Abu had blown up the men’s room at Penn Station.

  He told them they should not venture out onto the streets of New York together under any circumstances. But they could of course go out separately within two or three days, as long as Abu Hassan promised not to take any more hand grenades for a walk.