Intercept

by Patrick Robinson

  Again Mack made his exit through the rear door when the coast was clear, and drove back across the Blackberry River, concealing the Nissan in the trees and walking through the woods on the farm’s northern border. He took up his old position, staring through his binoculars across the frosty field, straight at the farmyard and house. This time the outside lights were all on and the barn doors were open. Mack could see only piles of straw through the open door, and there was no guard on duty outside. He thought he could hear the distant hum of a running engine, but he could see no vehicle.

  He waited for another fifteen minutes, back in the dark shadow of the woods, but he could see no discernible activity. And at a few minutes before 9:30 he began his walk across the dark and freezing field, aiming for the shadow of the barn.

  Fifty yards from the shelter of that rear wall, he began to realize he had misjudged the situation. There was clear and obvious noise coming from somewhere. In fact it sounded like an active workshop in a Navy shipyard.

  He could hear the periodic whine of an electric drill, the intermittent thump of a nail-gun, and the rattling revs of a big running engine. But he could see nothing around that corner into the well-lit farmyard. Whatever was happening was happening inside that barn.

  He moved back along the wall, to the far end, and tried to get a better angle on the open door. But that was no better. The only spot with a front and center view of the goddamned haystack was from the front door of the house in which were residing around ten armed cutthroats.

  Mack assessed that this was not a good spot for him and considered requesting that Coronado fly in a box of hand grenades, which he could activate and hurl in through the window. But upon reflection he decided this would not help his strict secrecy policy.

  EX-NAVY SEAL SHOT DEAD

  AFTER BOMB BLAST AT

  WEST NORFOLK FARM

  Mack’s imagination was apt to run riot at times like this, and every instinct told him he could not possibly attack a group this large, especially since all appeared to have loaded Kalashnikovs at their disposal.

  No, he would have to wait it out, until the barn workers elected to turn it in for the night. But who knew when that would be. From across the yard, using the binoculars, he could see at least six other men sitting inside watching television, their backs to the window.

  The night shift pressed on until just before midnight and then the noise stopped. The engine was switched off, the drill went silent, and there was only the murmur of voices as the lights went off and a group of five men came out of the barn. Mack watched four of them walk over to the front door. The fifth stayed to fasten a big padlock to a chain on the double doors. “Fuck,” said Mack, still waiting in the shadows.

  Just then the downstairs lights in the house went out, which robbed Mack of a shot at getting to the window and trying to make some identification. His chance of getting into the barn, without breaking in and making one hell of a noise forty feet from the nearest bedroom, had also passed.

  With immense reluctance, he turned and headed back across the field. Again he had taken a big risk, and again no reward. “Towelhead pricks,” he grumbled, knowing that the following night might mean an even greater risk.

  IT WAS ALMOST 1 A.M. on a brand new Tuesday morning when Mack finally arrived back at the sleeping hotel. He walked through the reception area and stood by the dying embers of the log fire in the residents’ lounge. He’d been this cold before, but not in living memory.

  He finally hit the sack just before 1:30 and slept the deep sleep of the just. The following morning he stayed in bed until 8:30. He had a light breakfast—coffee and a couple of croissants with apricot preserves—and immediately left the hotel.

  He fired up the Nissan and headed straight down the road to Torrington. As he passed the front entrance to Mountainside Farm, he noticed there was a figure in a heavy black jacket standing alone in the woods, about twenty yards to the left of the track that led to the blacktop.

  “I don’t think he’s been there all night,” muttered Mack. “But you never know. Poor bastard.”

  He covered the eighteen-mile journey in a half-hour, parked in a lot at least a half-mile from Cutlers (not wishing to run into Aimee), and walked down to the hardware store he’d noticed on Main Street. He wandered through the aisles and picked up a hefty-looking padlock and key, as well as a slim flashlight. Lastly, he moved over to the heavy-duty area and found a bolt-cutter, with thirty-inch handles, just in case.

  He gassed up the car and drove straight back to the Blackberry River Hotel, where he spent the day either sitting by the fire, locked in his room, reading, sleeping, or going through a SEAL exercise routine, which would certainly have put a civilian in his grave.

  Mack skipped lunch, just drinking a couple of cups of coffee, but headed downstairs for an early dinner at 5:30 p.m. He ate grilled New England scrod, with spinach, salad, and fizzy water. No starter, no potato, no bread, and no dessert. Maybe later. Mack Bedford never went to war on a full stomach.

  At 10 p.m. he said goodnight to the receptionist, who manned the front desk until eleven, and slipped quietly up to his room to change. Remembering he’d been what he poetically described as colder ’n a well-digger’s ass, all night over at Mountainside, he wore a T-shirt, then two dark turtlenecks, his heavy Navy sweater and scarf, parka, gloves, and combat boots.

  He moved softly down the back stairs and out the rear door. Moments later he was on the road, aiming the Nissan at Norfolk central, and over the bridge toward Mountainside. There was hardly another vehicle on the road, and while he wondered whether there was in fact an all-night guard at the entrance, he did not drive back toward it.

  Instead, with his headlights lowered, he drove through the darkness up to his usual copse of trees and parked out of sight from the road. He shoved the big padlock and key into his pocket, and picked up the heavy bolt-cutters. It was pitch black when he crossed the road and entered the wood that guarded the north side of the farm.

  Mack knew the way by now, and navigated his way through the trees in zero visibility. He arrived at his usual spot and trained his binoculars on the farmyard across the wide field. Again he could see there was activity, with lights on in the farmyard, barn doors open, more lights inside, and, just faintly, probably because he guessed it was there, the faint hum of a running engine.

  There was just one difference. Mack could see one man standing outside the barn, about forty feet across from the front door. He could see no one else, but the supreme magnifying power of his Special Forces binoculars pulled up an image that Mack, quite frankly, could have done without. The guy was holding an AK-47, unmissable to a Navy SEAL.

  In itself, this was not a problem. Mack could have crept up on the guy and killed him any one of a dozen ways. But dead bodies he did not need. Because right then these lunatics might abandon the mission. And this did not fit in with Mack’s plans. Obviously, he intended to end it for them. On his terms. In his time. And in a way that would cause al-Qaeda and everyone involved with them the most shattering damage. In Mack’s view, dead bodies were a major pain in the ass.

  He picked up the bolt-cutters and set off once more across the crunchy acres of the freezing field.

  As he drew nearer, he once more made for the shadows, crouching low and half-running, the classic mobile stance of the Navy SEAL coming in for the fast attack.

  He reached the night-black cover of the barn wall, and kept stock-still for three minutes. Discerning no movement, he just stood and listened to the industrial din emanating from the barn. He edged along the wall, and peered around the corner, a course of action that offered him two separate pieces of bad news.

  First, there was the armed guard, leaning on one of the barn doors, his rifle slung across the lower part of his chest. Like fucking Che Guevara, stupid prick, Mack thought. He makes one wrong move, I’ll shove that Kalashnikov straight up his ass.

  There are only a few people in this world who could make such a statement and mea
n every word of it. Most of them are United States Navy SEALs.

  The second piece of bad news had to do with the padlock. It was in place on the near door, but from what Mack could see, it was locked and there was no key jutting out. That meant someone had the friggin’ key, and that someone probably intended to lock up when the barn workforce quit for the night.

  Mack considered that he had an eighty percent chance of fooling that someone, and he just decided to wait it out. But somehow, sometime on this night, he, Lt. Commander Bedford, was going to find out what the hell was going on in that barn. And if he didn’t like it, it was not going to happen.

  Twenty minutes later, Che Guevara took a coffee break. He called into the barn and asked if anyone else wanted any. A voice called back, “Four, please, all with sugar.” And Mack watched the guard walk over to the house.

  The door opened. The light flooded out onto the farmyard, and was gone when the door closed again. Mack came out of the traps like a grey-hound. Luckily the right-hand door was pushed back beyond the ninety-degree line to the barn, which put the padlock slightly out of sight to the yard, but closer for Mack.

  He reached the lock and softly jolted it, pulling down hard. As he feared, it was securely locked. Wielding the bolt-cutters he snapped the blades onto the padlock’s cast-steel curved bar and cleaved it in half. He twisted it off, shoved it in his pocket and replaced it with his own padlock. He snapped it shut, just as the first one had been, but Mack left the new key jutting out of the hole.

  He picked up the cutters, checked the spare key was in his pocket, and bounded back into the shadows. Elapsed time: less than one minute.

  He watched the guard return ten minutes later, bringing with him a tray of five cups of coffee. He walked into the barn, presumably to distribute the hot drinks, and emerged holding just one cup. Temporarily the noise from inside subsided, but it started again in five minutes—the drilling, the dull thump of the nail gun, and the running engine. Mack could only wait.

  Finally, at around 12:30 on the new Wednesday morning, the motors died. The lights went out in the barn, and five guys trooped out. In the false light of the yard Mack could have sworn one of the men there was Ibrahim Sharif, the terrorist he always thought he recognized.

  He’d studied the photographs long and hard, but still he could not be sure. One of the five was a very big guy, and Mac thought it could easily have been Ben al-Turabi, but again he could not be certain, because they were mostly facing away from him.

  Precisely as last night, no one lingered long in the living room of the house. The television light went off, and so did all of the downstairs lights, except for the one in the kitchen. There was no longer a guard in the yard but the outside lights were all on.

  Mack watched someone emerge from the front door and walk across to the barn. He pulled first one door shut, and then walked three strides back for the other. He closed them together, and without hesitation, twisted the key in Mack’s padlock. He opened the lock bar and threaded it through two of the big chain links. Then he pushed down on the bar to shut it, twisted the key once more to double-lock, then pulled it out and dropped it in his pocket. Mack smiled the smile of the profoundly cunning.

  The man walked back to the house, entered through the front door, and shut it behind him. Mack watched the outside lights go out and then he slipped from out of the shadows.

  Softly he walked to the center of the wide barn doors, and opened his own padlock with the spare key. The chains fell slack, and, putting the padlock in his pocket, Mack eased open the big door and slipped through the narrow gap. He pulled the doors shut behind him, and turned his new flashlight onto the wall of straw that towered over him. Right now he could see nothing remotely industrial.

  He moved to the side and shone his flashlight the length of the straw wall. Then he noticed the wide front “wall” was not joined to the side “wall.” There was a space between the big square bales that formed the entire structure. Mack could see they were all held together by lengths of dark red twine.

  He edged through the space and found himself inside a large shoebox-like structure, all made of straw, with no ceiling. Mack found this incredible. But more incredible was the single content of the box: one large, full-sized yellow school bus, good for about thirty passengers. From out of its doors came a succession of cables. The entrance to the bus was wide open, and Mack stepped inside and shone his light.

  The entire rear end of the transporter was stacked with wooden cases, some nailed down hard, some half open, others completely open. On the floor were a couple of drills, a nail gun, several screwdrivers, a couple of hammers, and two small hand carts. The bus felt warm as if the heating system had recently been running.

  Mack walked back outside and checked the space around the “shoe box,” inside and out. On the left, the area inside the barn’s end wall, was a pile of transparent plastic sacks that contained a white powdery substance, like cement or sugar. All around were plastic cans of fuel oil, maybe even diesel. And in the air was the deeply unpleasant whiff of ammonia.

  Mack would have known that smell anywhere. It was the one that lingered after a blast from an IED. It was the aftermath of an explosion from an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb. And it had also been in the caches of explosive that Foxtrot Platoon had ransacked out of the Afghan mountains last time they were on duty together.

  Mack walked around to the front of the bus, and on the front destination-display above the driver’s seat was one word: CANAAN.

  “Mother of God,” breathed Mack. “They’re going to drive this fucker into the school and blow it to high heaven, right in the middle of Abraham’s Day. And they got enough explosive in there to knock down Wall Street.”

  He re-boarded the bus and walked back to the rear seats. He re-examined the bags of white powder, noting that they each contained over fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. He also found sacks of nitromethane, two bags of powdered ammonia, and five tied nine-inch high bundles of dynamite, all agents to increase the intensity and speed of the explosion.

  “Holy shit,” whispered Mack. “These bastards are not joking.”

  He switched off his flashlight and moved to the door, easing it open and squeezing through the narrowest possible gap. There were no lights on, and he grabbed and re-locked his padlock. At which point two people each received the greatest shock of their lives—Mack Bedford and the guard he referred to as Che Guevara, who suddenly walked around the side of the barn.

  The guard froze and Mack instantly shone the flashlight directly into the man’s eyes, blinding him. He temporarily grappled for his rifle, but then lost consciousness when Mack landed a thunderous right hook on the side of his chin, fracturing his jaw in two places.

  Mack wheeled away to his right and ran past the corner of the barn, where he grabbed the bolt-cutters and headed out to the field like an Olympic sprinter, pounding over the frozen ground, his heart beating furiously, his ears straining for sounds of an uproar back in the farmyard.

  He never broke stride. And, racing in the cold glow of a pale moon, he reached the treeline and crashed into the welcoming shadows. For a few moments he stopped and trained the binoculars on the farm. Nothing. No lights. No movement. No sound.

  Swiftly he ran through the trees and across the road. There was not a car in sight, and in the dead silence of the night, the Nissan, when it started, sounded to him like the re-launch of the space shuttle.

  He drove quietly into the parking lot of the hotel just before 2 a.m. Then he crept through the darkened rear section of the downstairs area and headed to his room, where he immediately picked up a message from Benny, asking him to call him when he got in, no matter the time.

  Mack called Benny from his cell phone. “I didn’t know you’d be up this late,” Benny joked. “I got some news, probably not operational but extremely interesting.”

  “Shoot,” said Mack.

  “The man from 21D landed in Riyadh via Paris two days ago, and we track
ed him to one of the royal palaces, where he met with several imams and Saudi princes. Yesterday he left on a royal flight, one of the king’s Boeing 747-300’s. It landed in Peshawar, and a government registered car took him into the city. He’s staying at the home of a very senior minister, Shakir Khan.”

  “Guess that figures,” replied Mack. “They were in Madrid together, right? Just before the trains were bombed.”

  “Correct. And our guys think Shakir’s the instigator of that phone intercept the Brits handed us.”

  “Well, it looks like this thing’s gonna blow on Friday. I need you and Johnny to head up here today, and I have a whole list of things for you to bring.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “One hundred percent. Now grab a pen.”

  Mack asked for tape, det-cord, and electronic detonators with a 300-yard range control box. He also requested a Satnav GPS system with full radar fitted into a laptop, a couple of hammers, screws, screwdrivers, metal brackets, batteries, a battery-powered drill, flashlights, electric wires and cutters, and black cammy cream, the SEAL’s special device to take the shine away from faces in the moonlight.

  Finally, he asked for C-4 plastic high-explosive or Semtex, the favorite of both the Navy SEALs and the Mossad. It’s neat, clean, and easily transportable—it it’s not too heavy and it comes in small off-white blocks that are easily lashed together with duct tape. Also it blows like a sonofabitch. Terrorists used it to blast a hole in the portside hull of USS Cole in October 2000, and to knock down the U.S. military housing complex Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

  “What the hell are you planning to blow up?” asked Benny. “A fucking mountain!”

  “No, but I can’t afford a mistake. See you later, buddy.”