Aim True, My Brothers

by William F. Brown

  “Such as October 19,” Hafez grinned. “The commemoration of the Yorktown battle.”

  “I was in Beirut when I read that Wagner will be here. In my mind, it all fell into place. Apparently, their presidents rarely miss the opportunity to give patriotic speeches, and Wagner is no different from the ones before him. From old photographs, I saw they always build a reviewing stand and podium right there.” He turned and pointed to the grass field in front of the Visitors Center, where they were indeed building the reviewing stand. “Wagner will be there, with all the other politicians, diplomats, reporters, and a row of network TV cameras. It is the hand of Allah at work again. Insh’Allah, Wagner will be there, and we will humiliate them and give the Americans a fiery celebration they will never forget.”

  Al-Bari turned to his right and pointed to a tall white granite monument standing on the riverbank near the town. “I am an infantryman, Hafez. I know weapons and tactics and I know how to employ artillery. That is the Yorktown Monument. They built it in 1881 and you can see it for miles up and down the river, gleaming in the bright sunlight. What does that tall column bring to mind?”

  “Why, it looks like an aiming stake, a big, beautiful white aiming stake, Ibrahim. Any artilleryman would know that.”

  “And it is precisely located on those lovely USGS maps you bought for us. Once we know that, we can plot the range and direction to any other point on the map. That is why we are not going to take a shot at the White House. Why should we, when our target can be destroyed right here, in the open, and on national television.”

  They turned away from the battlefield and walked down the slope to the crowded parking lot. “We shall drive over to Gloucester Point. I have a few other things to show you,” Al-Bari said with a secretive look in his eye. Leaving the National Park, he told Arazi to turn right onto Main Street and drive into the small, well-preserved, eighteenth-century town of Yorktown. They drove down the steep hill that led to the river, and then turned sharply left along the riverbank. A quarter mile farther, it passed under the Coleman Bridge, which crossed the river high above them, connecting the two shores.

  As they passed under the bridge, Al-Bari pointed up. “I studied engineering and architecture, Hafez. This bridge is highest at the center where it crosses above the ship channel. Do you see those steel columns and the spiderweb of girders that tie them all together? They carry the weight down to two rows of concrete pilings in the river. If we can knock out even one of those columns, the center span will come crashing down, and this is the only place where the river can be crossed for thirty miles.”

  “Everyone over here will be trapped.”

  “I am not trying to trap them, but the bulk of the Secret Service, the State and local police, even the Army will be on the Yorktown side in wheeled vehicles. If they cannot cross, they will have a difficult time pursuing us. Oh, they will have a few helicopters, but they will lose many precious minutes before they can form a credible response. Minutes — that is all it will take for one more harmless camper truck to drive away down those back-country roads.”

  “So you think we can escape? This is not a martyrdom mission?”

  “No. Any fool can die trying to kill the President. We must be the ones who get away and live to brag about it. That will shut them up. It will shut them all up,” he said, thinking of Beirut, Sayef, and those dogs on the Shura.

  Al-Bari had him drive on. They looped back around to Route 17 and drove across the bridge to the Gloucester shore. Once off the bridge on the other side, he took a road to the right and a second one that carried them back downhill toward the York River. Beneath the bridge on the other side, he pulled into a small gravel parking lot and looked back across to the wooded Yorktown shore.

  “Tell me what you see,” Al-Bari asked.

  “Not much — the bridge, the high bluff all along the far shore, and the trees. You cannot see any of the Visitors Center or the battlefield, or anything else from down here, but the Yorktown Monument is clearly visible standing high above the trees.” Arazi looked harder and suddenly his face lit up. “Now, I understand. If we cannot see them, they cannot see us. They will think they are safe, but we have that beautiful white monument, our aiming stake!”

  “And that is all we need,” Al-Bari smiled. “If you plot this point and the monument on the map, you will see that the field in front of the Visitors Center is five degrees to the left and exactly nine thousand five hundred feet out. That is one-point-eight miles — the perfect distance for the weapon.”

  Arazi stared out across the river for several minutes. “So beautiful and so totally unexpected.” His gaze gradually clouded with a look of concern as he turned toward Al-Bari. “But to be truly accurate, don’t we need an observer at the other end to adjust and correct our fire? Do you want me to be over there?” he asked.

  “No, no, I need you here with me, Hafez. Besides, we shall have three very good observers over there. They will give us more than enough data to correct our fire.”

  “You have others over there?” Arazi frowned. “I was unaware…”

  “We will have CBS, NBC, and ABC!” he roared with laughter. “What could be better?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Washington, DC, Thursday, October 11, 3:00 p.m.

  When Eddie Barnett stepped through the door of The Hog the next afternoon, Mouse was already in the rear booth, drinking a martini and waiting for him. Barnett paused and looked at him. “A martini? Here? You’re not trying very hard to blend in, you know.”

  “Some standards are not meant to be compromised.”

  Barnett shook his head and glanced back at Lenny the bartender. “Wow, have you been watching James Bond movies? I didn’t know you knew how to make anything like that.”

  Lenny scowled. “It so happens I am a skilled mixologist, but between your Diet Cokes, the Ice Queen’s Tabs, and Wisniewski’s boilermakers, how the hell would you know?”

  “Point taken,” Barnett answered with an apologetic nod, and then sat opposite Mouse.

  “If you are finished with the fascinating banter with your bartender, Ambassador Fawzi is most anxious to know if you learned anything, and I must report.”

  Barnett set a file folder on the table in front of Mouse. “Yes and no, as you might expect. First, we were not involved in Arazi’s disappearance, nor does anyone have anything current on Al-Bari. The CIA, DHS, and my Director all assured me of that, so you can relay it on as official. Also, we ran it through the NIC network and are checking with the regional hospitals, local and state police, and the video cameras at BWI, Philly, Richmond, and the New York airports. So far, everything’s negative, but it will take several days to get a complete report. There are a lot of bases to touch.”

  “Are you certain the CIA didn’t grab Al-Bari and pack him off to Guantanamo?”

  “They say they didn’t know anything about him, much less touch him.”

  “Do you think we can believe them?”

  “Well, I believe the guy who told me, but that’s not saying he got a straight story from Langley. I don’t want to press it any further for now. If they get too curious, they’ll bulldoze me right off the board and take over.”

  Mouse looked down. “And the file folder?” the little man asked as he pulled it across the table. “May I?” he asked as he opened it without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small stack of black-and-white photos. He frowned as he saw that the top one was a high shot of Ibrahim Al-Bari passing through US Customs. Clean-shaven and wearing an expensive business suit, the shot caught him looking up at the camera with a mocking expression.

  “An arrogant bastard, isn’t he?” Mouse observed.

  “Well, I guess he could have flipped us the bird.”

  “Flip us the…?”

  “Never mind. The photo was shot at Dulles thirty minutes before the body of your man was found in the restroom.”

  “I doubt that was a coincidence.”

  “INS says he arrived on a Jordanian pass
port in the name of Sayyid Fuad, an architect headed for a design conference in Pittsburgh. The real Fuad, if there is one, never arrived.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We have inquiries out to Jordan through State.”

  “I believe we can get better answers, and sooner.”

  “Good,” Barnett replied as he placed the earlier photo of a bearded Al-Bari in the Syrian Army uniform and moustache next to the photo from Dulles. He stared at them for a moment, looking back and forth. “What bothers me most is the guy's eyes — hard and cold as ice. Way down deep, he's a couple of bricks short of a full load.”

  “A couple of… Yes,” Mouse smiled. “A couple of bricks, I must remember that one.”

  “He can shave off the moustache, dye his hair, and even put on a skirt and makeup, but he can’t change those eyes.”

  The two men stared at the photo, at Al-Bari's eyes, until Mouse said, “We also made a few more ‘inquiries’ and learned that he is an expert with heavy weapons and explosives.”

  “Are they part of the engineering curriculum at Cambridge?”

  “No, but he was good enough to teach the subject in one of the terrorist training camps in the Tribal areas of Afghanistan along the Pakistani border.”

  “The Predator drones must have missed that one.”

  “They missed him and a lot of other things, too.” Mouse drained the glass and held it up for a refill. “We reached out to some sensitive sources we have in Damascus and Beirut. He came and went, and left a lot of enemies behind.”

  “Like I said; it’s in his eyes. They have that ‘he-doesn’t-play-well-with-others’ look written all over them.”

  “Doesn’t play well…?”

  “It’s an American school thing.”

  Mouse looked at him and shook his head. “No, he ‘does not play well,’ and if he has gone off on his own — just he and his Cousin Arazi — they will be very hard to find. That is why we do not want him setting up camp over here in your country. Talented, well-armed, and highly motivated — that would be a disaster for everyone, including us.”

  “We’ve got to get inside his head and figure out what he’s after.”

  “Well, I can think of several types of targets that might appeal to a man like him.”

  “I don’t sense any ego in the guy. He’s rational and cold as a surgeon.”

  “Yes, but he has lost family now; you cannot discount that blood,” Mouse answered. “He has attacked Israel once already and he is Palestinian, so I would look at major Jewish symbols here — their Embassy, a big synagogue, or perhaps a concentration of Jewish people in one of your major cities, especially New York.”

  “Plenty of choices there, I’m afraid.”

  “He also fought your soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably losing friends and compatriots in the process, to guns, bombs, even drones of yours. So, there would be anger and a desire for revenge against some high-level economic target such as an airport, a military base, a defense contractor, a nuclear power plant, perhaps the subway, or a port.”

  “I know we guard things like that very heavily. In fact, it has become an industry of its own, but I never quite got it. Do you really think an economic target like that is big enough and symbolic enough for him to trade his life for?”

  “Was the World Trade Center?”

  “Point taken, but those guys were disposable, single-purpose schlubs. None of them was Ibrahim Al-Bari,” Barnett said, as he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “For my money, I’d bet on the glitz and glitter of a big, government target such as Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, or even the President himself.”

  “Most of those would be extremely hard to hit now.”

  “Was Sadat?”

  “Touché. We both know it can be done. You can get to anybody, but those are suicide missions. I read the fellow’s background, and I do not see Ibrahim Al-Bari as a Jihadist. He is smart and motivated, a tactician. He will want to see it happen and live to brag about it.”

  “I get the same vibes.” Barnett shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Anyway, there is one more tiny little thing I need to let you know about, Mouse.”

  The Egyptian looked back and cocked his head suspiciously. “Why do I think I am not going to like this?”

  “Because you won’t. It appears we are getting some outside help. None of my doing, I assure you. As soon as Al-Bari was ID'd, because of the bus and because of the dangers to the Jewish communities here in the US, the State Department went around us and read the Israelis in. They are sending one of their top counter-terror experts over here to lend us a hand.”

  “The Israelis,” Mouse groaned and rolled his eyes, less than pleased. “They can be… most difficult.”

  “Be that as it may, I was told to make nice.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Uh, that’s another thing… the name is Ullman, Rachel Ullman.”

  “A woman? They are sending an Israeli woman?”

  “Not just a woman, a full-bird Infantry Colonel who has also been ‘seconded,’ as they say, to the Mossad from time to time. We pick her up at the airport tonight.”

  Mouse groaned again. “We?”

  “Yes. You and I — the Starsky and Hutch, the Ben and Jerry, the Lone Ranger and Tonto of counter-terror.”

  “The Lone Ranger and Tonto? Which, pray tell, am I?”

  “Need you ask? The point is, we are a team, and we can handle anything.”

  Mouse stared back at him, deadpan. “A female Israeli Infantry Colonel?”

  “Well, almost anything,” Barnett conceded.

  “Why must you bring in the Israelis, Edward?” Mouse shook his head. “You have not worked with them. Their security people are used to doing whatever they want, killing first and asking questions later.”

  “I doubt they’ll try to act that way here.”

  “Wishful thinking. What we need to do is convince her that Al-Bari is after a domestic American target, maybe she will get bored and go away.”

  “Homeland Security is already beefing up security at the most likely ones — the embassies and consulates, power plants, the ports and airports, subway systems, show-case commercial centers, bridges, and any other big infrastructure anyone can think of.”

  “Well, that is a start.”

  “Provided Al-Bari does what we expect him to do,” Barnett shrugged as Lenny brought Mouse another martini and him another Diet Coke. “Our people did some brainstorming this morning. If he needs more help than Arazi can give him, they think he would look at the IRA, maybe at some of the radical Islamist cells in California, or Detroit, or New Jersey; or to some of the other foreign or home-grown terrorist groups here, like the Black Muslims, or an eco-terror group.”

  “I’m not sure where that would take us. He is far too clever to break any of your laws until it is too late. Even if by some blind luck your people do catch him, all they could do is deport him, and he will be on the loose again.”

  “Maybe the Israelis are right, Mouse. Al-Bari is in bad need of killing, and my gut tells me we don’t have a whole lot of time to do that before he does whatever he came here to do.”

  “I would not disagree. He has been here for almost a week now. If he were going to do something in Washington, I think he would have already done it by now.”

  “Maybe, but you’re overlooking the money. He needed it to buy something, and three hundred thousand dollars is an interesting number.”

  “And a lot of money.”

  “Not if he planned to do something really big. You couldn’t buy a team of men, or even a good hit man for that number. And if Al-Bari’s used it to buy something, it’s nowhere near enough to buy, say, a missile, a shoulder launched rocket, or a nuke.”

  “We are guessing, Edward. We need much more information,” Mouse shook his head.

  “No doubt about it.”

  “So, when does our ‘help’ arrive?”

  “Tonight, on the 10:15 El Al flight into Dulles
. I’ll swing by your Embassy at 9:00 and we’ll go out to Dulles and pick her up. Okay?”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “No sweat, Tonto, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

  They arrived at the floodlit terminal a half-hour early. With Barnett’s FBI credentials, they got through Security and sat in the INS supervisor’s office at International Arrivals drinking tepid vending-machine coffee, waiting for the flight to land. Finally, the PA system announced the El-Al flight was at the gate. Twenty minutes later, the first of 288 passengers scurried through the automatic doors to queue up in a half-dozen Immigration lines that had opened by then. Most passengers were college kids or elderly American Jews returning from tours of Israel, so the checks were cursory. A gray-haired, four-foot-ten-inch grandmother from Skokie toting two shopping bags of gifts for the grandchildren is hardly the profile of a terrorist or drug mule.

  When the line had finally thinned out to nothing, a lone figure came through the door and walked directly to an open INS Agent. It was a woman in her late thirties with straight blond hair, carrying a small suitcase and a leather shoulder bag. Eddie Barnett’s impression was of an attractive woman, but a stern one. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had a military, almost Spartan bearing as her gray eyes slowly scanned the room like radar seeking out a target. They finally came to rest on Barnett and Mouse and stopped, as if she were examining a couple of bugs under a microscope. Barnett felt himself squirm. Her eyes seemed to focus on Barnett for a few seconds and bore straight through him. Finally, she turned away and handed her passport to the Immigration clerk.

  Mouse leaned toward Barnett and whispered, “You were right, Edward. It should be a piece of cake.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Columbia, Virginia, Friday, October 12, 10:30 a.m.

  The next day, Hafez Arazi drove his Toyota up the James River from the campground to the small town of Columbia, with Ibrahim Al-Bari and the white camper truck following. Dante’s Automotive Repair Garage was not hard to find. They drove through the gate and parked in the front lot near the building. Al-Bari had chosen Dante’s Garage carefully. Columbia was a small town on the south side of the James River halfway to Richmond, well away from Yorktown, but time and prosperity had passed it by decades before. On top of that, Dante’s was located in a run-down section of town between the mostly boarded-up downtown and the river. The building had once been a gasoline station with three repair bays, two of which had hydraulic lifts and one had a grease pit. A ten-foot-high chain link fence with a reinforced gate surrounded the lot, accented by interwoven strings of barbed wire across the top. Behind the old building, he saw the carcasses of a dozen chopped-up automobiles, a few trucks, and a badly smashed school bus with the lettering ‘LIBERTY BAPTIST CHU’ running down the side. Piles of rusting body panels, bumpers, and frames had been pushed up against the bus and the sagging board fence behind it.